Age-Old

age-old

/ˈājˌōld/

adjective:

"having existed for a very long time".

Back in the day, centuries ago perhaps, 40 would have been described as age-old.  Then later, after the industrial revolution when retirement age was raised to 60, and even a bit later now (like 65 or even 70), age-old has been redefined.  But people are now living even longer and once again age-old is being re-assessed and this time with far greater impact. 

In 1967 authors G.C. Johnson and W.F. Nolan co-authored "Logan's Run". It was made into a movie in 1976.  In the movie, due to over-population and dwindling resources, people's lives were terminated at age 30 (with a promise of reincarnation into a more "blissful life", which was a lie). In the book the "expiration" age was actually 21 but apparently it was difficult to get named actors close to that age, let alone look 21.  In the story those who did not want to be terminated went into hiding and became runners.  Those who succeeded in their escape found a sanctuary place and for the first time saw their first old person.

Just as an aside, but utterly unconnected to what I will muse about though quite amusing as book and movie titles go, Cormac McCarthy wrote a book in 2005 and it was quickly made into a movie in 2007.  BUT it was not a sequel to Logan's Run.  The book/movie was "No Country for Old Men". I thought I'd just mention that.  It came to me just now and I can't resist the humor (But I must add that the movie, though great, was not for the faint of heart).

Back to some serious stuff.

The baby boomers today are not only themselves  getting older, they are taking care of or, at the very least, dealing with an even more age-old segment of society - their own  parents .  It is a new phenomenon.  "New" that has all a lot to do with everything age-old.

This is not sociologically trivial.

The baby boomer is also labeled the sandwiched generation.  Their own children are at middle-age, who have  children of their own, all representing the bottom half of the sandwich.  The upper half are the baby boomer's own parents. 

This overlapping of generations, however we label them - Millennials, the Gen X, etc. has not occurred at anytime in "ancient" history.

What are we to make of this?  The baby boomers may not only have their own parents to contend with, there are three generations following them. 

Let's think about this.  So, we have the baby boomers' parents already engulfed by the deepening shadows of twilight.  The baby boomers themselves are peripherally at the edge of the colors of sunset - fading red, violet and deep-orange of twilight - while Gen X are directly below the blazing sun of  noon, searing in the midst of their careers, raising their young children and worrying about them, Millennials  are at the workplace that do not seem to  meet their expectations in a world that in their minds is not working for them, while some of the Gen Z are already at the Millennial's heels.

This is interesting and at the same time frightening because this might be too much for society, the government and the various institutions to grapple with.  Let's leave that to politicians, anthropologists, historians and social pundits to dwell on. I will get back to this in a bit.

It was my wife's birthday a few days ago.  We had a nice lunch - just the two of us - and she wanted to spend the rest of the day at the Museum. Partly, we needed to pick up our new membership cards.  We've been supporters of the museum since the kids were younger and we continued to be supporting members.  Of course, it was strange to go to the museum on a birthday but then - why not?

We found the museum that one particular day as a place for the very young.  There were young school kids herded and kept in line by a handful of young teachers, then there were toddlers and the two to four year-olds with their grand parents trying very hard to keep up with them.  While waiting at the main lobby for the planetarium to open up for the next show, we watched a three year old experiencing the biggest thrill of his young life astride a heaving and growling mechanical dinosaur while his parents recorded the event.  That was a day that, to me, encapsulated the overlapping of generations.

At the planetarium the handful of adults were outnumbered by the children of various ages for a show that was "The Stars of the Pharaohs". The contrast was not lost to my wife and I, although it gave us hope or at least we believed there was hope in children watching with youthful eyes the age-old story of the time of the pharaohs - who better than to define the really aged; or the next show - "The Dinosaurs of Antarctica at the IMAX theater.

Let us focus on the really age-old of all the generations - the 90 year-olds and over still among us.  Lest we forget, they are the last remaining population to have come before us all. There are an entire four generations behind them. They are the parents of a good segment of the baby boom generation. We will call them the real age-old generation.

To the baby boomer generation's grand children, these are the "ancient generation". They are the grand parents of the Gen X. What do we know about them?

They were young children or young people during WWII. Those older than them are mostly gone now.  Many of them have memories of the war.  Many still living may have fought in that war, while others may even have lost their parents and loved ones.

They became parents of the generation that today are the sandwich generation and in so doing opened up the world to all the possibilities never seen before the big war. They are our direct bridge to that part of history that was the foundation of all the generations today.  

What is happening to them today is not only worth a conversation among us all but they - those still living - are where we begin a serious soul searching as we find ways, the most humane we can come up with, on which to lay the foundation for future generations to come. 

Let us be direct and blunt about this.  How do we take care of them? If nursing homes or letting them live by themselves or neglecting them are all we have then woe to all who follow.  It is because, without exception, twilight and the night are where we are all heading.  The final destination for all generations is that each will get to become the age-old generation of the future.  That future will be best served if we do something today in the present.

The age-old generation.  

Three years ago from my second most popular musing, "A Most Valuable Companion", I quote what the late Robin Williams said about being alone.

“I used to think the worst thing in life was to end up all alone. It’s not. The worst thing in life is to end up with people that make you feel alone”.      Robin Williams

To that I wrote:

...  we have those living alone in their homes, old and weak, and more by a much higher number in nursing homes. The former is tragic by sheer helpless isolation; the latter a much sadder state to be lonely or feeling alone even when there are people around.

I can't find a study that shows if nursing homes actually hasten or lengthen the lives of the really old. What of the quality of the time and care?  What are the alternatives?  This seems like mainly a problem in the developed world. Is it because longevity in third world countries relatively shorter?  Or, is the cultural foundation in the latter part of the world better equipped to deal with their age-old generations?

I am not offering any answers but to get the reader to think.  Are nursing homes the best for the age-old generation? The answers we find will determine what will confront us when it is time for our place at the setting sun, when twilight will then seem to recede faster than we think.

Here is an even deeper question. Age regression is a well documented occurrence among most of the elderly.

"Age regression occurs when someone reverts to a younger state of mind. ... may revert to childlike behavior as a means to cope with anxiety or fear. ...  as they grow older".

Are we prepared to leave a "child" like parent in the care of  a facility where they will feel alone even when there are people there?  That was what Robin Williams worried about. The capacity of the elderly to forge friendships or ability to develop new relations with strange people is next to nil at that point of their lives.  Once they revert to that child-like behavior, it will be both sad and tragic to be cared for by strangers.

Below is the link to "A Most Valuable Companion" for those who may be interested:


https://abreloth.blogspot.com/2017/01/a-most-valuable-companion.html 


And for an even more uplifting musing:  "Twilight" might be worth a read for those who haven't yet,

https://abreloth.blogspot.com/2016/09/twilight.html

Decisions

Every now and then we run into someone, a complete stranger, in the briefest of moments, that simply stands out, ever so slightly changing how we view certain things in life  that ended up occupying a spot in our memory, perhaps permanently. Sometimes even altering our life's perspective in a profound way.

Weeks ago I was at the cashier's checkout for groceries at the local store.  While the cashier was scanning the items I noticed the bagboy carefully and very slowly putting them into  plastic bags.  The cashier often glanced silently at the obviously inexperienced bagboy. Twice, using no words, she motioned to him the proper way to bag an item. A few moments later, as the cashier was processing my payment, I noticed from one corner of my eye, a middle-age lady was  at the bagboy's side, helping him along, making sure the two cartoons of eggs were laid flat and by themselves in one bag and the grapes and  tomatoes went together by themselves, etc. 

The nametag on the bagboy's shirt pocket said "Fred".  I told him, "Fred, you did a great job". The lady who was helping him coaxed Fred to say, "Thank you".  Fred did and mumbled a few words explaining where the eggs were among the bags now neatly arranged in the shopping cart.  The lady looked at me smiling, unabashedly proud of Fred's momentary accomplishment.  As I was about to wheel out the cart, the lady took a step or two near me and said almost in a hushed voice, "You know sixteen years ago, a few months before Fred was born, my obstetrician and the hospital administrator sat me down at the doctor's office. 

That lady was Fred's mom. The doctor explained to her and her husband that the fetus carried the autism gene.

She added, "The medical assessment was that  the child was likely going to be autistic - a very high probability, in fact.  It was still early in the pregnancy so I was told that there was some decision to make about "exercising one option" without having to worry about ethical or legal repercussions".  

She knew what that meant but it was not the choice they took.  She added, "Sixteen years and look at him now".  She was still literally  beaming with pride and joy only a mother can express.  I told her what she did was very noble and she responded that that was one decision she and her husband and family (they have two other children) never had once doubted was the right thing to do nor had any regrets whatsoever.  One decision. One life.

Fred is not going to be ever "normal" for the rest of his life; whatever "normal" really means in a world now so socially fractured, so politically discordant, even ethically confusing. Bagging groceries might be right at near the top that a mother can ever hope for Fred.  She may aim some slightly higher calling for Fred but it will not be monumentally ambitious nor would it matter much for Fred's ego.  And that is where we find that simplicity can triumph over a lot of things.  Fred may never be able to discern nor will he ever be capable of comprehending deep human emotions, sympathy or empathy even (in the classical sense). He may never exhibit the finer points of social graces, nor appreciate a well-written novel nor the nuances of poetry nor the beauty of an impressionist painting. He may never fall in love, even develop a crush, or harbor infatuation.  He feels physical pain but never the anguish of a romantic heartbreak. He will have frustrations over a chore, but never about composing a letter; clearly never about punctuations and grammar.  He expresses happiness but he will always exhibit it not to get past the threshold of the joy of innocence.  He will always be free of and unencumbered by the complexities of a complicated life that we - the "normal" folks - routinely have to deal with.

Such is how we look at Fred. However, we cannot think of Fred without the love of a mother. We think of his mother and we look back at sixteen years ago. Could we have made the same decision?  Could we have made the same sacrifices?  Even today, we know Fred's mom has to drive him to and from the grocery store where he "works". We all know that Fred's mom was not only faced with one life-altering decision, she was prepared even to this day to a life-long commitment and dedication that came with it. The sacrificial burden she will carry for the rest of her life.  The thought that Fred will outlive her is one worry that confronts her daily - who will care for Fred when she is gone? 


At an alumni luncheon just recently - one of a handful of company  annual get-together events for retirees - my wife and I happen to sit at a table with a few retirees we met for the first time.  As we go to these functions we seem to see less and less of the people we know.  Actually, most of those we see now are the new batch of retirees.  We must look ancient to these folks but they sure are glad to see fellow retirees still living and able to go to these functions.  We felt that way too when we first came to these events over a decade ago.  In fact, I would make it a point to sit with those who seemed to have been retirees for sometime; in other words, those that looked much older than we were.  From them we knew that retirement must have been good to these folks and they were always a great source for the secret to growing older "slowly".  You know what that means.  To put it bluntly, it is the art or science, if there is such a thing, of somehow managing to slow down the ravages of old age. There must be such a thing because there is this gentleman who served in the Korean War before working for the company.  I don't think he ever misses these events because he is always present.  We've missed several but the odds that he only shows up every time we go is not likely the case.  Anyway, he is 94 years old now and he comes in by himself (a widower) and he drives a Lincoln SUV.  He now walks with a cane but as late as two years ago he would walk and stand straight like any sixty year old newly retired employee.  There are many of these folks we get to talk with in these functions.  I thought it was worthwhile to talk about that but there was something else during this one luncheon.

Before getting to a table just before all the attendees had arrived we chanced upon a conversation with a couple who happened to pick up their name tags at the reception table at about the same time we got there.  The four of us decided to sit at the same table.  Eventually we were joined by three other couples.

The husband, from the first couple we just met, was  the retiree and he was originally from England. Inevitably the conversation led to "how did y'all meet?", particularly because he was British and she was from Florida and they met in the Bahamas - but not on a cruise ship or vacation, as I initially tried to deduce in my feeble attempt to be Sherlock Holmes. She had an interesting story, far nobler than I expected. I happened to sit next to her.

She is an only child. While still a young adult her mother was stricken with Parkinson's disease.  She decided to be her mom's care giver outside of everything else the hospital or medical staff provided, specially when it was time for her mom to be home.  They decided to relocate to the Bahamas, at least temporarily anyway, where they found an alternative medical facility for her mom which was also less financially draining compared to stateside care.  It was a sacrifice on her part, being a young woman and all that, but she did.  And that is how she met the dashing young man working for an off shore oil company, packaged with an exotic English accent. She continued to care for her mom until she passed away shortly thereafter. She said, "I treasured the moments of my mom's last year and though it was a great sacrifice on my part, my mom's desire to be less of a burden was far nobler than anyone can ever imagine.  And we had such a year."

That was not the end of her story.  She had more to share and since I was willing to listen she sensed an opportunity to talk about another story of her life, perhaps as a way to lighten another load.

Fast forward to over two decades later, three children and stateside now, she continued her story.  Two of her older children now have families of their own but a twenty-two year old son still lives with them.  That was not really unusual but the story is.

A few years ago her son got into an auto accident.  He drove while drunk. She revealed that early on in her re-telling.  The car hit a tree.  The son survived with a very serious head trauma.  By the time they got to the hospital, the doctor had their son in an induced coma to stabilize him.  

After a week, with their son still in an unconscious state, the medical staff was not optimistic.  Later, the doctor, asked her to summon her husband from work, to discuss the situation.  It was time to terminate medical care.  It was time to pull the dreadful plug.  Needless to say, it was a long discussion, a heated one at times, but she and her husband decided, NO.

Fast forward to four-five years later. Their son recovered.  More physically than mentally.  He can function with the facility of maybe a pre-teen kid, mentally, though physically competent, otherwise.  She, the  mother, again became the care-giver, tutor and physical coach.  Their son had to be taught everything that he had lost - the power of speech, the ability to feed himself, and everything in between.  From proper hygiene to dressing himself and ultimately to handle simple tasks like turning on the TV, watch it as any pre-teen would, prepare his food and ultimately to even  use a cell phone.

While we were having our lunch, she showed me a text message from their son who was at home. It said, "I burned the kitchen while cooking otherwise everything is good enjoy your lunch." No commas or other punctuation  marks. Sensing my shock, she said, "He has a sense of humor, doesn't he?.  He does this all the time".  Then  she smiled wryly.  But I can tell, she was okay with all that.  She may have been quite pleased that her son does that.  How does one person deal with something like this?

What can I say?  What can we all say?  Saints do exist?  She had to be, to have gone through that, first with her mom, and now a son who throughout the rest of his life will depend on her or others (when she is gone) for all of his life's needs.  He will never be gainfully employed nor will he be able to start a family of his own. But there is something he is able to do.

She takes him on a speaking schedule, whenever possible or invited, to high school class rooms to talk about drunk driving.  More importantly,  to talk about his story, only in a language young people will understand effectively to convey that one simple message - "Don't Drink and Drive"

What he may lack in eloquence is more than made up for by the story he is able to tell.  And there are many others like him who are involved in this program that also include victims or surviving relatives of those who perished or maimed permanently from other drunk driving incidents.

Decisions. We all have to make them.  Fortunately for almost all of us, we did not have to go through the same ones these two courageous ladies did. Two mothers whose commitments call for much beyond what is required of an ordinary human life.  But as we come to know, motherhood is one extraordinary side of humanity and what these two have exemplified are those that could only come from the heart of a loving mother.  

When we get to think about the world we live in - this world -  we realize  that  apart from all the tangible physical things, the occurrence of events in time and space, our lives are a series of decisions.  In fact, the ticket to get on board the train of life gets punched everytime we make a decision.  A series of decisions we must face as we get through the day - from the mundane of what to have for breakfast, to the life-changing ones of what career to pick, whom to be friends with or whom to be married to or deciding not to be, and everything in between and beyond.  We make choices. We are responsible for those choices' consequences to us and to others.

When the mother decided to have the child despite forewarnings by the doctor, it was one that changed her life on one hand; it was to give life, on the other. It would be a life of sacrifice for her and her family.  For the second mother, the decision was about making a single life to continue.  Its cost to her and her family is weighed again, as in the case of the first,  against that of a single life. Were those the right decisions? 

Count yourself with the blessing of not having to make such similar decisions. But lest we forget, how much of a blessing is it to the two mothers who chose the decision they made? That is the more profound question to ask.

P.S. The great news is that more and more businesses do offer opportunities for people like Fred.  We see more and more of "Freds" and when you do, take time to appreciate them and, more importantly, the person - usually a mother - behind each of them.

If you have teenagers, encourage them to listen to one who speaks with the voice of the son (from the second mother).

A Barrel of Oil

Oil. Carbon footprint. Emissions. Pollution. Climate Change. All of these without doubt today, and for quite sometime now, make up the collective global Bogeyman. If they are the composite multiple personalities of a much maligned entity, it is aptly symbolized, by acclimation among many, as "a barrel of oil". A barrel of oil, for the sake of addressing the devil that it is perceived to be, owns that personality -  in a manner of speaking, that is.  We begin to look.

There is only one place to start. The universe. Afterall, we all belong to it and we can't think of any place from which to begin. We, all living things and every conceivable inanimate object we can think of, from the smallest invisible elements to the largest structures lurking beyond the night sky, belong to that universe.  But none of any of them can lay claim to dominance though we may find a common denominator, if we try, and should ask this, "What are the  most abundant stuff in the universe?".  Imagine as far as your mind can reach as you look up at the night sky.  Unaided, your eyes see twinkling lights of stars.  Some are smudges of light.  They could be galaxies. Galaxies, each with hundreds of billions of stars.  There are trillions upon trillions of these tiny lights. What are they made of?  A legitimate question indeed, because surely they are made predominantly of something.

Imagine, gathering them all together in a ball. Let's say, we color code the elements that make up the ball.  What would it look like? It will practically be one color.  One dominant color and the other just a shade of it.  If we use red for the dominant material, the ball will be all red, with tiny blotches of pinkish red.

The red is hydrogen and the sprinkling of pink would be helium.  The two of them will make up about 98% of the total stuff and everything else - from lithium to iron to gold - make up the rest. But we'd like to know at least what comes in third and fourth. What we find is actually quite a significant revelation.

Oxygen and Carbon are next, trailed by nitrogen followed by a host of many others.  But as a living organism, a thinking one at that, we may ask also, "Why does the universe need the rest of the insignificant many others?"  Surely, the universe does not need any of the rest if it has 98% of two elements already.  Actually, the universe would have been content with just one; if the universe knows what or how to be content with anything.  Well, it had no choice.  

The laws of physics, or the Laws of God, has a say on everything. If the universe is a stage play, the four main characters are Hydrogen, Helium, Oxygen and Carbon; the rest are bit players and stage hands, but as in any theater production they all have roles to play.  The script, the dialogue, the plot and cadence of the story  were all written by the universal screen writer - God.

So, how did all of these come about?  It all begun as pure energy in a flash - the beginning of creation.  Following the script, energy soon begun condensing into something tangible.  Funny names like the six flavors of quarks, then electrons and protons, emerged from the universal soup that took hundreds upon hundreds of millions of years to cook.  Hydrogen with its single proton and one electron was the building block but it was more than that.  Locked inside each hydrogen atom is a miniscule amount of condensed energy.  The script called for gravity to eventually take over, compressing and organizing what used to be every hydrogen bouncing and avoiding every other hydrogen all over the universe. But after awhile, due to the immense attraction of gravity as clumps of hydrogen gas are drawn ever larger to form into gigantic clouds that by now are self-compacting into tight immensely massive balls with intense pressure and heat, two hydrogen atoms would  be forced to fuse to become helium, lithium would result out of further compression.  As pressures build up some more, oxygen and carbon followed.  All of these new species have in them the energy from the moment of creation.  For what seemed like eternity those are all that were around for many millions of years.

13.7 billions years later, here we are! Each time hydrogen fused under unbelievable pressure energy is released.  That is what powers the stars.  Some of those balls of hydrogen became massive stars, attracting and organizing themselves into a swirling cluster of countless other stars circling around a common center to become galaxies.  In one of those galaxies was a medium-size but stable star that became our sun.  4.5 billion years in the making is our solar system.  In it is a small rocky planet - Earth.

In that little planet came some of the smartest creatures. Creatures that think and argue.  Most recently, came a debate that was hardly noticed but by a handful of people.  In that debate came all kinds of dissertations and assumptions and arguments.  Someone, or a group of individuals with plenty of time on their hands, went to calculate that a barrel of oil is equivalent to 22,300 human labor-hours.  Converted monetarily, from the labor hours it represented, that barrel of oil is worth $164,000.

We will not get into how they came up with that because some were either too intractably complicated to wrap our minds around or too simplistic as to be absurd.  Some ignored, others took into account friction, heat loss and other kinds of suppositions and assumptions.  Alternatively, someone just simply imagined that in the absence of a fuel, he had imagined ten people pushing a car, loaded with passengers.  To get to a distance, undefined but quite enough to get the passengers from point A to point B, he estimated that over 20,000 man hours were needed to get an equivalent number of miles from so many gallons of fuel derived from a barrel of oil, had that fuel been used to power the car.  Like I said, it was simple though likely inaccurate.

However, it is true that way back in ancient history when slaves carried Cleopatra or other historical royal luminaries in a transport of some kind - called, what else, a king carrier - on their shoulders, there had to be some kind of human labor-hours expended to move them from place to place. Calculating forward and comparably against today's performance of a Rolls Royce or Mercedes Maybach on several gallons of fuel, many thousand man-hours would be needed to do the same task that these cars will do for today's luminaries and celebrities; but the king carrier of ancient times, though it stood for pomp and circumstance, would have been much less comfortable and clearly without the soothing air conditioning, HEPA-filtered air, computer-tuned suspension and a sixteen-speaker-surround sound system.

I can't help but give thought to the four main characters in the universal stage play. Once these characters came on stage the flirtation between hydrogen and carbon was unstoppable.  Actually, every hydrogen can't help itself but to immediately cling and hold fast to every carbon it meets.  Four of them in fact would readily embrace one carbon atom.  Which is fine because there are far more hydrogen than carbon. Soon several such embraces would occur in all kinds of combinations.  These union between them would be classified  inevitably as families known as hydrocarbons.  Another group of them combined a little differently.  They will be called carbohydrates.  Both very critical to our existence. But one thing remains. Their retained energy as individuals would now be their combined latent energy. Hydrogen and carbon in permanent embrace can, however, be broken up, explosively but controllably if handled properly.  Further on that later.

As marriages go, the closest to a monogamous relationship among these universal characters would still be a harem of sort - one carbon holding on to four hydrogen.  That was in the original script because carbon by nature has four outer electrons that need to bond to be stable.  So, one carbon and four hydrogen symbolically become CH4.  It is called methane. Again, these unions would become complex, even more so, and by the time more carbons and hydrogen linking together in their own agreed-upon communities of ever complex organizations, we get propane, butane, gasoline, diesel fuel, etc. - all to be managed away on their own separate paths. What is left is the so called bottom of the original barrel of crude oil. The remaining gooey, black substance would be pitch or asphalt or bitumen in the King's English.

Just as a side note, speaking of King's English, here is a quote from the (KJV) Old Testament depicting the instruction for Noah's Ark.

Genesis 6: 14-15, So make yourself an ark of cypress wood; make rooms in it and coat it with pitch inside and out. This is how you are to build it..." Pitch used by Noah to waterproof the ark is widely interpreted to be what was then a naturally occurring substance off the ground, which would have been common in the Middle East at that time (or even now). Even if we look to the Noah story as allegorical, the mention of pitch by the Biblical author was based on factual material. A few thousand years later in what was then called the New World, Native Americans were known to waterproof their canoes with the same material - pitch - which they would scoop from the ground and applied to the bottom and seams of their canoes.

Pitch today from the refining process of crude oil is still gooey, sticky and still black, but combined with aggregate of stone and sand, laid over ribbons of compacted ground is what we would call an asphalt road. There are thousands upon thousands of miles of these roads around the world. Asphalt literally paves much of the entire globe. Asphalt roofing material cover over 90% of homes in the U.S. Basements and below ground sections of any building are water proofed with asphalt-based material.

Asphalt is merely part of a barrel of oil. Unlike cement that has to be quarried, transported and processed, asphalt is the bottom component of a multiple personality that is a barrel of oil. By the way, cement production is not only solely made possible by oil fired processes, it is also a high energy consumer (from transporting quarried material to shipping finished bags of cement). Impossible to accomplish with electric vehicles or furnaces.

Not to be outdone, oxygen also has a special affinity to carbon. Millions of years ago, much of the early life forms were from the assimilation of carbon and oxygen and out of that came microscopic plants - phytoplanktons - that permeated the ancient seas. Again, the script called for other life forms to develop - also as microscopic animals - called zooplanktons that subsisted on the plant planktons. Carbon, as in almost all life forms we know today, is the scaffolding, the railway if you will, for how living things get put together and how they spread out to cover much of the earth, on the ground, up in the air and deep underground. Phytoplanktons and complex plants still get their energy from sunlight - that ball of hydrogen, remember? But more importantly, zooplanktons that feed on plant planktons, are then dined on by small fishes that get eaten by big fishes and so on and on the proverbial food chain.

Millions of years later carbon and hydrogen from dead plants got buried deep as piles and piles of them layered over and over. Compacted over time by heat and pressure their bonds were sealed for eternity. Or so, we'd think. But not for long, because a new scene, new act on stage takes over . Again, as in today's common refrain of "there is an app for that", there was a written script for what followed. Hydrogen and carbon, any hydrocarbon bond, in the presence of oxygen and source of heat or ignition gets broken up. In so doing they release the energy they've been keeping for so long. In the break up carbon abandons the hydrogen and embraces a new partner that was the cause of the breakup. It picks up two of the oxygen to become a threesome called carbon dioxide. If only one oxygen eloped with the carbon, it is a much worse renegade - it is the ever more villainous carbon monoxide. But in the universal script written from the beginning of time, plants would readily want carbon dioxide to grow and flourish. It will take carbon for itself, spit out oxygen for all air breathing life forms to use. The real existential threat is for carbon dioxide to go away and for us to run out of oxygen. It is on the script all along.

Is a barrel of oil really the devil? If in a flash of super power you are able to wish every barrel of oil away right this moment, you will be sitting on bare soil, without shelter, no heat and no refrigerator to keep your food fresh. Oh, wait a minute. There is no grocery store. If you're lucky you will have a horse. And remember you will need 300 of them that your SUV used to give you on a gallon of gas.

So, there's the story. The question is, "Are we willing a do over and go back to many thousand man-hours to move from point A to point B"? And leave the families of hydrogen and carbon alone? What of the tools and machines that need to be oiled, or fueled to get us going? There are now not enough whales in the seas, whose blubbery fat we used to boil, to provide us with what used to be the only source of oil to light up our lamps and make the simple machines run smoothly. Whales have oil from the ground to be thankful for. Had that first Pennsylvania oil not come out of the ground at the time that it did, whales by now will have been driven to extinction. Forget the industrial revolution, forget the plastic frame that encases your computer, your cell phone and on and on. Forget the world we have today. Forget about reading this on your phone, tablet or desktop.

Think carefully before we condemn a barrel of oil. Think also about why we should rather be spending time and resources to find ways of harnessing the power of a barrel of oil cleanly and safely instead of condemning it as the devil that it is not. It is much of what the universe is made of.

And remember, if you can remember only one thing - you are a carbon based life form. You are a living being dependent on carbohydrates for energy, oxygen to breathe and hydrocarbon to warm your meals, to move you around to places your ancestors could never have done, to crusie on ships or fly on airplanes to go to distant places never before achievable within your alloted vacation time or even for just a weekend. Think hard before you wish away something that also provide a source of livelihood for millions of people around the world.