Beauty is in the Light of the Beholder

Eyesight, of all our senses, is the most far reaching in that we don’t have to be close to an object to make sense of it. Our eyesight is many hundreds of times more powerful than that of hearing and smell, while taste and touch had to be up close and personal.  Sight is powerful indeed that first impressions are largely through our eyes and even after a time when we change our initial assessment the metaphor we use is still visual when “someone shows his or her true color”. “As far as the eyes can see” is a phenomenal superscription of that ability but what we see and how we see is probably the most disputable of all human experiences.  Courtrooms attest to that when witnesses to a crime or accident give varying accounts of the same event.  And what about the seeming universality of disagreements that occur when we put together referees/umpires and athletes and fans watching the same game? Then we have this mysterious appraisal of beauty that not only confounds ordinary people but poets and philosophers as well.

“Did my heart love till now?

Forswear it, sight!

For I ne’er saw true beauty till this night”

-  Romeo and Juliet.

While browsing in an arts and craft store in a small town somewhere in Texas my eyes came upon a plaque, hanging by a wall that proclaimed, “Beauty is in the eyes of the beer holder”. I asked the sales lady if they sell a lot of the plaque and who buys them?  She said they do sell a good number of it but surprisingly it is wives buying them for their husbands’ man-caves.  Perhaps, as a reminder to the men that beer, lots of it in most cases, is nothing more than calorie-laden beauty enhancer.

While Aristotle called beauty "the gift of God", Socrates called it "a short-lived tyranny" and Theophrastus has a different idea all together because to him beauty was apparently "a silent deceit”.  I don’t know what Benjamin Franklin meant when he said, “Beauty and folly are old companions."  The most intriguing quote I’ve read is that of Kahlil Gibran with this, “Beauty is eternity gazing at itself in a mirror”.  I don’t know how to even begin to decipher that one unless by someone who is a lifetime subscriber to narcissism.

Sometimes when I muse on any subject I can’t help but include when appropriate the perspective from some of our animal friends which, by sheer power of imagination on my part, acquire the ability to talk.  We need that because animals see the world differently.  I mean, literally some animals see what we, humans, have no ability to see.  From the time Isaac Newton split ordinary white light into its various wavelengths it followed quickly our discovery of the limitations of our vision.  We see only in the middle range of the spectrum of light. From both ends of the spectrum the short wavelength of ultraviolet and the long infrared are invisible to us. 

A viper, specifically a diamond back rattle snake, was accused of killing and consuming an endangered field mouse somewhere in California.  It acted as its own lawyer and this was her defense. Addressing the judge, a javelina, which the snake respects because it is too big to be its prey, “Your honor, with all due respect to the prosecutor who should know better, I had no way to know it was a field mouse that I ate because I could not have recognized it since I only see in the infrared.  I cannot distinguish in detail the features of the field mouse from that of an ordinary one.  They both look like red blobs as they move.  It was at night too when it happened and if I may mention I am carrying eggs that will need nourishment.  The prosecutor, your honor, is a cayote, so he too would not have been able to recognize the difference because he only sees in black and white as all other canis species, to wit dogs and wolves, who cannot perceive color”.

The judge had its own visual limitation of nearsightedness as all javelinas have, so it was oblivious to the flicking forked tongue as the viper slithered to and fro as it made its closing statement, presenting only a bluish/green silhouette to the judge. The viper’s eloquence won. Not guilty.

The training manual for some birds of prey include recognizing the urine trail of rodents which become visible in ultraviolet.  Here is what one raptor said to another, “That field down there across the stream has got to be littered with voles. Do you see the whole place is practically a quilted patchwork of ultraviolet? Let’s go swoop”.

 The question then is why we who have a very sophisticated brain and the extraordinary physiology supporting it cannot see in all the spectrum of light.  I’m sure many would like to see in infrared and ultraviolet giving us a full range of visual capability.  

Actually, we should be thankful for the limitation of our vision because a full range of the spectrum will actually overwhelm us.  Just imagine trying to admire the beauty of a garden full of roses of various colors.  Along with the yellows, pinks and, of course beautiful red roses, our field of view will include infrared blobs of bees and butterflies hopping from one bloom to another and tracks of all rodents like squirrels and even rabbits the night before will further muddy the view with all kinds of ultraviolet patches on the ground.  Campers who seek the darkness of night to contemplate the vastness and wonder of the universe will be denied the view of countless stars that form the band of our Milky Way galaxy extending from the horizon diagonally upwards into an endless blackness of space.  Instead, their eyes will see blobs of insects flying above and around, bats and migrating birds and even fireflies – anything that has body heat – will register their presence in infrared and don’t forget anything that reflects ultraviolet.  The beauty of the night sky as we know it will not appear as such because seeing the full spectrum of light will make individual stars smudgy and blurry.  Even a crackling camp fire will not be so inviting when everyone around it will appear like ghostly apparitions from Hades, exuding with the redness of infrared reflecting the energy of the fire and the human body itself.  Oh, and those meat eaters among us may not find it so appetizing if their preferred rare or even medium rare steaks glow in ultra-violet.  Hot soup and warm desserts like bananas foster will luminesce in infrared.

Great renaissance artworks by Rafael and Boticeli would not have been possible because how will those artists have painted them had they seen everything in full spectrum?  Why our eyes are sensitive to red and yellow is supposedly part of our evolution so that our ancestors could recognize ripened fruit and berries.  Green is pleasant to us because vegetation is a welcome cover, let alone it is the color of fruit bearing plants.  Paul Cezane made a living painting apples and oranges when he put to good use bright reds and yellows in all kinds of lighting themes.

In a small seaside community where I grew up there was a man who was born blind.  His eye cavities were completely shut at birth, eyelids permanently closed, devoid of eyelashes even, and if he had corneas behind the skin we could not tell.  He goes around the neighborhood, walking but not using a cane.  He walked by sliding forward one foot at a time to “feel the ground” and warn him of any obstruction, including potholes.  What I remembered most was that he never seemed to show any self-pity and the people in the community treated him almost like everyone else.  I mean people, younger or older alike, would listen to him and respected his opinions on a lot of subjects.

I marveled at his eloquence in conversation and his grasp of the world from local to national politics and social issues.  He never did go to school so he could not read or write obviously, but he listened.  He listened to radio and to every conversation within hearing distance.  He had an uncanny ability to remember voices which was how he recognized everyone.  He “saw” and remembered people through their voices as normally sighted folks would recognize faces.  He also had the ability, as if he can see the people in conversation, to know how many were there and he could respond specifically to whoever was speaking or making a point.  I met him for the first time one day and it was several days later when I talked to him again and he effortlessly remembered who I was just from my voice.  I asked him how he would remember.  He said, “The same way you remember someone you met last week”.  That was the first time I realized that if vision had its limits the mind didn’t seem to have one.

What we lack in our inability to see in full spectrum is more than made up for by this one faculty that no other creatures have.  It is our ability to see the inner beauty of another human being.  We can see character that is behind the façade of skin and clothing; look deeply into someone’s eyes and see the true meaning of his or her true feelings; and we can feel the depth of expression when someone looks at us with pride, sympathy, happiness or sadness.

Physical beauty that our eyes can see is all reflected light. True beauty is one that penetrates through to our mind where there it will reside for as long as we live.  Memories are the paintbrushes of true beauty because with them we are able to touch up, refresh, even change the tone and color of the images of our youth and experiences that may have faded can be restored to even brighter hues.  Beauty then are in the mind’s eyes of those who remember.

A Half Filled Glass

Such is life and such is our world – it is filled with optimists and pessimists – where a half filled glass is either brimming with all kinds of possibilities or that the other half is horribly empty and therefore inadequately needful, depending on who is looking at it.  Here is something interesting.  Before the 1830s, the Webster Dictionary did not have the word pessimist.  It could, in fact, have been as late as 1865 before it was commonly used.  Whereas the word optimism was already in the English lexicon since between 1730 and 1740, it took a whole century for its antonym to find its place in language.  One must wonder, “Why”?

Then, as soon as both words co-existed folks immediately began to correlate the two in fundamental terms like one would look at a proton and an electron.  Another interesting tidbit is that the negatively charged electron was discovered ahead in 1897, while the positively charged proton was only later identified and scientifically proven to exist in 1918. No relevance whatsoever to the point I will be making but I thought you might want to know that.  Or, perhaps the mere mention of “negatively and positively charged” could trigger a metaphoric effect towards wherever this musing will lead to.  Anyway, soon philosophers, political leaders, writers, ordinary people could not resist the inevitable contextual references between the optimist and the pessimist.

“The pessimist sees difficulty in every opportunity. The optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty.”

--- Winston Churchill

“An optimist may see a light where there is none, but why must the pessimist always run to blow it out?”

--- Rene Descartes

As it turned out the side-by-side pairing of the two words has resulted in the most number of quotes attributed to so many people and nothing even comes close to the number of posters, picture frames and plaques produced.  Could it be that just as the glass example suggests we are equally divided 50-50 into optimists and pessimists?  Not quite but close for Americans according to recent polling, although pessimists exceed optimists today.  A few years back most Americans were positively inclined.  Depending on which polls and when they were taken, it was 49% and 47%, switching back and forth between optimism and pessimism, and apparently there is always the remainder of folks (4% or so) who are either indifferent, don’t have an opinion, or they simply belong to a separate class of people – the “Oh, well, whatever” group.  But it is not true that the latter are mostly teenagers!

The Greeks are still the most pessimistic people in the developed world while Latvia and Lithuania are the most optimistic.  The most optimistic people in the third world may defy expectations because they are from some of the poorest regions of Africa.  The countries of Burkina Faso and Comoros have 95% of their population believe that there future lives will be better than their current ones.  Coming in second at 94% are Niger, Benin, Guinea and the Somaliland region.  The reason cited is that perhaps people who live at or near the abyss of the economic strata believe that their current situation could only get better, since there is no place to go down anymore but up, hence the reason for widespread optimism in those countries.  Unfortunately, the saddest countries are also mostly in Africa as well.  On top of the list is Chad, followed by Central African Republic, Congo, D.R and then there is Afghanistan.

So, what countries have the happiest population?  From last year’s survey, Denmark, Norway, Switzerland, Netherlands and Sweden in that order topped the list.  And we say, “Hmm”.  By the way, the U.S. is at no. 11.  What is surprising is that three of the top five countries also have some of the highest tax rates – over 50% of personal income.  Ranked 2, 3, 4, in the top ten highest tax brackets are Sweden, Denmark and Netherlands, in that order.  To which my Democrat friends inevitably proclaim that there is a method to the current administration’s maddening goal to raise taxes in America.  Yes, there seems to be a method to their madness.  Or, is that just simply madness to their method. 

So, let’s get back to the half-filled glass.  No relevance whatsoever is the fact that the country’s electorate is divided almost down the middle between Democrats and Republicans while the Independents swing back and forth like an unregulated pendulum. 

At a personal level, what should we be?  States of optimism and pessimism had been there all along before there were words for them.  If you ask anyone optimism is the one we should adopt, should we not?

“A pessimist is a person who has had to listen to too many optimists.”

--- Don Marquis

“The nice part about being a pessimist is that you are constantly being either proven right or pleasantly surprised.”

--- George Will

And let us not forget the realist.  Although I will have to say that a realist is really either an optimist or pessimist who hedges his or her bet.  Generally speaking humans should be realists as grizzlies are too, but let’s set that aside for the moment.  My favorite wild cats – the cheetahs and lions – are optimists by nature.  The cheetah’s hunting success is only one kill for every ten attempts at a chase while lions, even hunting as a pride, catch their intended prey about 25% of the time.  A journeyman major league baseball hitter does better than a cheetah and about the same as the lions in terms of their statistical successes. However, the cats somehow remain optimistic since they keep chasing despite the potential for being kicked or gored by their prey and despite the dauntingly low kill percentage average.  Both man and the grizzly are realists because they hedge their bets by varying their dietary habits.  They can go vegetarian if meat is not readily available, or a mixture of both vegetable and fruits with fish and meat to balance their food supply.

We, humans all, have every reason to be optimistic.  Why not?  We’re the dominant species, we’re on top of the food chain and we’re the only ones who contemplate and can think and reason.  Yet, it is exactly the ability to think and reason that makes some of us optimists and others pessimists.  A realist is someone in a momentary state of mind when he or she is torn between feeling hopeful or dreadfully worried – a state of “Oh well, whatever”. 

“In my last year of school, I was voted Class Optimist and Class Pessimist. Looking back, I realize I was only half right.”

--- Jack Nicholson

Apparently, there is no one who is totally 100 % indifferent to a situation.  We are either okay with one thing or not so thrilled about it.  To be independently neutral of opinion is rare.  “Oh, well, whatever!” is something teenagers may say, of course, but not with any kind of definitive conviction one way or the other when faced with the choice of being hopeful or suffer with forlorn hope.

A half-filled glass is not half empty because technically there are trillions of air molecules above the liquid line up to the brim.  So the glass is full after all.  And there the optimist brandishes his or her ability to see when it is not even faintly apparent to others.  The pessimist may claim to be cautious and rightfully so but only if that were the only condition. 

Yes, the pessimist worries most of the time; the optimist is constantly hopeful; the realist shrugs.  And here is where the positive proton and the negative electron come in (I can use them after all).  So, if one were an optimist, he or she is best paired with a pessimist, and vice versa.  The most common element in the entire universe by a huge margin over carbon (second most common) is the hydrogen atom – it has one proton (+) and one electron (-).  It is an unstable element but if two of them can grab just one oxygen atom (it has 8 electrons and 8 protons), we get water – the very same that can fill half the proverbial glass.  One could say that that is neither here nor there but think about it for a minute. With water we now have a stable molecule that has ten electrons (-) and ten protons (+), negatively and positively charged particles in equal number and in tight finger clasps.  Allegorical perhaps but it does tell us that optimists and pessimists could co-exist with the right balance.

One who is exceedingly ebullient should pair up with one who often is paralyzed with caution.  And if you’re by yourself you can adapt the Jack Nicholson state of mind – an optimist at one time, a pessimist at another.  The “whatever” crowd is the neutron – neither positively nor negatively charged.  The problem with that is that you never get to participate, especially not in a charged up action between protons and electrons.

Is it always bad to be a pessimist?  I don’t think so.  General Custer and his officers and men must have been all optimists at Little Bighorn and so were the cavalry of the Light Brigade during the Crimean War in 1854.  We know what happened.  Perhaps a few pessimists or a temporary state of pessimism could have changed the outcome. General Eisenhower on the other hand first postponed the invasion by a day, pessimistic about the prospect on June 5^th, then gave the go ahead the following day, D-Day, confident and optimistic but a realist because in his breast pocket that morning of June 6^th he kept a short note to read just in case the invasion failed.  He was also known for the quote below:

“In preparing for battle I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable.”

--- Gen. Dwight Eisenhower

If you read carefully into that sentence, Eisenhower was pessimistic on one clause and, with a simple conjunction, optimistic on the other.  He was an organizer and a stickler for thorough and detailed planning but also believed that however best laid plans were, circumstances that ensue during execution will shred everything to pieces and the discipline in planning is what will save the day in order to adapt to unforeseen conditions.

So, there it is.  You can either be the bottom half of the glass or the upper half, or you can be just the glass (indifferent to whether it is half-filled or empty) but be prepared to switch whatever state of mind you were in if necessary when the situation calls for it.

Who Wants To Live Forever

Will our attitude about aging, dying or desire to live forever be different if, say, our average lifespan is 200 years, 500 years?  Or, put another way, what would our outlook be if we do not get past our tenth birthday?  A short book, more like a novelette, “Logan’s Run”, tells a futuristic story of a society where people’s lives were “terminated” at the moment they got past their 21^st birthday (in the movie version the individual’s “lifeclock” was changed to end at 30, perhaps because producers could not find enough named young actors twenty one or younger; in fact, Michael York, the lead actor, was already 34 years old during filming).  The book was set in the year 2116 – that is exactly a hundred years from this year.  (Book is free online and the movie, I’m sure, is available from Netflix or Amazon).  The popularity of that and many fantasy stories in that genre are an indication of society’s fascination, if not an obsession, with aging and dying. 

Today we’re told the average human lifespan in the developed world is above 70 years and more and more are getting up to the high 80s and reasonably living a fair quality of life; this puts aging by far in a better stage than three decades ago.  Now, for perspective, in ancient times men were old and dying in their 30s and 40s. Baby boomers realized that it was not too long ago, growing up, that to be 60 years old was not only a retirement terminal age but that there was not much to be expected beyond that.  Today, we’re told that sixty is the new forty.

Here is the thing though.  We look across the whole spectrum of living things and we find life expectancy that can be very short as in an individual microorganism to a very long one as in one bristlecone pine that is supposed to be 5065 years old (tree ring counts prove it). The mayfly, a breathing, metabolic insect lives only for a day!  As a mayfly, that is.  It is not only a fascinating life span but one that is so fleeting yet observable within a 24-hour period.  However, I must disclose that the mayfly has a previous life as a nymph living as an aquatic insect, its activities mostly underwater, which makes it a wonder of adaptation.  It could live as a nymph for years before turning into a mayfly, to surface from its watery world, develop wings, mate, lay eggs and die within a day.

On the other hand a jellyfish is immortal.  It can keep on living unless eaten by predators or physically harmed in some other way.  It is in my opinion one of nature’s weird sense of humor because a jellyfish does not have a brain, let alone a structured backbone, with only a primitive sense of sight but with no ability to hear but it is endowed with immortality.  Why couldn’t humans have that gift? Tortoises can live up to 150 years, a few known to have lived beyond that, but a bowhead whale will be just about middle age as the tortoise reaches its age limit.  Here we are with our advanced brain power, an unlimited capacity to imagine, dream, and think up these wild questions about immortality and our lifespan is comparatively short lived compared to these creatures that will never understand simple philosophical questions, let alone ask the basic meaning of their lives.  I know we ask and we propose answers or speculate or offer conjectures but undeniably we do not have answers to the meaning of life either; but at least we try.

Meanwhile, since the dawn of time we asked, we pondered, we philosophized, we developed over a hundred different expressions of faith in the form of religion. We’ve come up with natural and scientific explanations of the world around us, theorized about everything as we seek for answers and indeed we did get some but not all the answers. Into the future we can expect even more as we begin to remove the cloak of mystery on many unanswered questions but only to ask even more. 

Out of all the questions we can come up with, nothing is more compelling, more intriguing, or sometimes more frightening to ask than what happens after death. It is such that we’d rather use a phrase like “passing into the great beyond” or use the alternative substitute like the “afterlife” as a way of coping. Quickly, you will note that such words are always more hopeful, stressing even that there must be something better after death.  I, like almost everyone I know, was raised in the tenets of Judeo-Christian faith but aware that there are other households all around the globe where different faiths are subscribed to including atheism and agnosticism. As a result children and adults grow up with particular biases already built in to their existing belief system. We know, or at least we can know if we spend the time to read up, that there are major and minor differences or just simply nuances in every religious belief from organized systems, including sects, cults, and sometimes from the fringes of the occult. What about someone who has never had such influence, completely devoid of such biases?   

Meet ELB, the Everlasting Being. He has knowledge of the natural world through science which includes math, biology and physics but he is indifferent to philosophy, morality, ethics, politics and religion. All he would like to work with is what he knows of everything that can be explained by hypothesis and proof.  He does not know his age or if his life has a limit but he does know the workings of the cells in his body and as much knowledge of all living things, the planets, the galaxies, the stars, and the workings of the universe to the extent that he has access to the most recent discoveries.  Here is ELB and his thought provoking views of the world. 

“I am made of recycled material and because of that, more than anything else, I am immortal. The iron in my blood is recycled from billions of years ago when it was first created at the belly of a supernova. All of the iron we find on earth today came from an exploding star that was many times bigger than our present sun.  In fact, all the elements beyond and including iron in the Periodic Table came from such an explosion. Our sun, as all stars are too, is a fusion reactor, a thermonuclear plant, and producer of but limited to the basic elements up to iron.  Its base material is hydrogen which when fused becomes helium. Helium when fused becomes lithium, and so on and on. Each element up to iron is a product of fusing elements together through extreme pressure and heat within the star’s core. However, as soon as the star produces iron it collapses in an instant! If it is just an average size star it will shrivel into a white dwarf or brown star, as what will likely happen to this sun in another 4-5 billions years.  A very large star will first collapse but immediately explodes as a supernova. It is during that explosion, when ultra-extreme pressure and heat will create the other elements heavier than iron – again by first fusing iron to cobalt, which will fuse to become nickel, and after more and more fusions later we get to silver and gold, and so on and on. Each fusion makes the next element heavier than the previous. More fusion will make uranium and plutonium. (I am taking liberty with the process by just labeling it as fusion because it is more complicated than just “fusing” the elements. The elements must combine and bond together in a particular way to create the next material).

The simplicity of the universe is what makes me immortal and its complexity is proof that I am.

The universe may only seem complex but in reality it is very simple since everything in it – from viruses to mountains to clouds to the planets, stars and galaxies – came from one basic element: the hydrogen atom that has just one proton and one electron, the simplest element there is. It was the first element created from out of the soup of highly energized particles that condensed from pure energy a few hundred thousand years after the moment of the big explosion that started the universe; hence, it is the most common element in the universe.  All that I see today through my eyes around me and everything that can be observed by every device that ranged from optical to radio to infrared telescopes were at one time located at a single point smaller than an atom. Nothing can be any simpler than one infinitely small dot of near nothingness. Then, as if from nothing, came what I see today as the universe after 13.5 billion years from that moment when it all began.

I will neither know nor can I ever know what was before that big explosion. But this I know. Once created nothing is ever destroyed. The rule the universe goes by is that matter may be converted to energy or energy can be converted to matter but nothing ever goes into nothingness.  The other rule is that everything is recyclable. Every molecule of water I drink today came from two atoms of hydrogen and one atom of oxygen that had been around for billions of years and as I expel them from my body they could go on as a water molecule in a water vapor or settle into a piece of iron. Well, three oxygens may go together and link with two iron atoms and combine to become rust – the oxygen and iron elements clinging together as the hydrogen is expelled to find another element to combine with. It has many possibilities of creating another molecule. If two of them together find sulfur they make an acid.  It may even find a grouping of seven other hydrogens and six carbons and six oxygen atoms and voila! Create vitamin C.  These three elemental characters will hold hands in many different configurations and they could become carbohydrates.  I ingest them and they could form with other compounds in my body to build up fats and other tissues.

Everything in me, everything around me is recycled. Even a single cell that “dies” is recycled; cancer cells included. Nothing anymore is created to add to the bulk or energy of the universe; but neither is anything ever deducted. What the universe has today is what it will have forever. However new something is, it has to come from somewhere or from components from somewhere else. If today I am at the tip of an endless recycling processes since creation then have I not always existed since?

The universe is matter, energy and information.  Where matter and energy are interchangeable, information exists to keep track of events caused by matter or energy or both.  A photon of light from across the universe coming from a star carries information about it for millions or billions of years until it is stopped and absorbed by another object, such as the retina of my eye or the sensor of a telescope. When I see starlight the photon has information about the star as it was perhaps many millions of years ago depending on how far it is from me.  Countless photons had left that star at different times but even if a group of them (numbering in the quintillion trillion) left at the same instant different observers from different locations in the universe will have differing perspectives on the star but the information will be the same.  One observer will see the star as it was a few thousand years ago while another may see it as it was four billion years hence but the information the observers see will be exactly the same. If matter, energy and information in the whole universe are eternal I must conclude that I too must be eternal.

If I had settled the question of my physical immortality then it follows that I must address the immortality of my consciousness?  Is my consciousness immortal? That is the question and I must say that it is. If I am the only one right now who can contemplate or at the very least observe everything around me, the universe is what it is because I am here to marvel at or ponder it.  Without me to think about these things that surround me who is to say that they exist or not?  How do I know that my consciousness too is not recycled?  I cannot know that but the physical vessel where my consciousness resides gives me the ability to receive and disburse information to and from the world around me. I have information, therefore I know.

Was it not Rene Descartes who said, ‘I think, therefore I am’? Descartes declared that the only thing he could truly believe to exist was his own mind.  Whether he does or does not have a point is not something I can judge, which brings me to the issue of philosophy, faith and religion. I am indifferent and I take a neutral stand for just one simple reason. Among the many differing religions and branches of philosophy that are out there, there is not one with a premise I can put to a test.

As interesting as these premises are, I cannot prove or disprove them but I am intrigued.  Let me look at some of them.

The Hindu religion is about as close to the premise of the recycling of consciousness as a parallel to the recycling and evolving development of species.  Below is a direct quote of a response from a Hindu scholar when asked about re-incarnation.

“Carnate means ‘of flesh,’ and reincarnate means to ‘reenter the flesh’. Yes, Hindus believe in reincarnation. To us, it explains the natural way the soul evolves from immaturity to spiritual illumination. Life and death are realities for all of us. Hinduism believes that the soul is immortal, that it never dies, but inhabits one body after another on the Earth during its evolutionary journey. Like the caterpillar's transformation into a butterfly, physical death is a most natural transition for the soul, which survives and, guided by karma, continues its long pilgrimage until it is one with God”.

“I myself have had many lives before this one and expect to have more. Finally, when I have it all worked out and all the lessons have been learned, I will attain enlightenment and moksha, liberation. This means I will still exist, but will no longer be pulled back to be born in a physical body.”

A Buddhist has this to say:

“To Buddhism, however, death is not the end of life, it is merely the end of the body we inhabit in this life, but our spirit will still remain and seek out through the need of attachment, attachment to a new body and new life. Where they will be born is a result of the past and the accumulation of positive and negative action, and the resultant karma (cause and effect) is a result of one’s past actions”.

The Judeo/Christian faith and Islam do not subscribe to reincarnation since each adherent only has one life to live and will have to account for everything he or she has done throughout the time of one’s life. There is only one physical body, one consciousness, one soul. A future event – a judgment day, a tribulation, an arrival of a Messiah or a second coming – is that time when everyone who had ever lived will be made to account for what they did or didn’t do during their lifetime.

I cannot say which one is right nor would I be capable of judging so I will only say this. One side says a person has one chance at life and one’s conduct will be judged accordingly, no opportunity for a do over. The other side says that there are actually many multiple chances to get it right; improving and evolving at each successive stage until one has reached the ultimate level; or sometimes be punished to a lower level, to suffer and pay for a life not well lived. One side sets aside a place, a heaven where good souls go to and a hell where bad ones are destined to live forever.  The other side creates a better state of life during rebirth on earth, or be reborn to a state of despair and suffering, re-learn the lessons during that tenure and perhaps be re-born to a better life on the next stage.  One creates one’s heaven or hell in the next life depending on how one conducted one’s present life.

The one common theme is the belief in the eternal state of consciousness and that is all where I can agree. I cannot know what mechanism will be the true one but I believe in the immortality of consciousness because of what I know about this universe. Matter, energy and information are known to prevail".

That is ELB and that is his opinion

I will continue to believe in my Judeo Christian faith because that is how I was raised and I am satisfied with its moral teachings. ELB is in fact a composite of everyone who believes that one life in the scheme of the vastness and age of the universe may not be enough to be held accountable for a mere ten, twenty, ninety years of life, or for that matter the short lives of babies, young children, or of everyone not given the opportunity to learn from the teachings of one or another faith and belief system. I leave that to anyone who cares to ponder during their own idle moments.

For a similar theme but with a different twist, you may want to read a prior blog, "My Conversations with Theo" by clicking below:

   https://abreloth.blogspot.com/2016/04/my-conversations-with-theo.html

SERIOUSLY

I must get to the point right away because the world we live in and the society we have become is now almost behaviorally immobilized by some inexplicable fear that is so difficult to deal with, or even recognize with a clear definition because what seems to be perfectly all right to say or do today could be by tomorrow a deplorably wretched thing to put into words or even attempt to act on.

I will not sprinkle this musing with hints and little clues or tap dance around the subject because this is about political correctness gone mad.  It is not political correctness, let me be clear, if we are simply and rightfully observing proper manner of speaking and acting politely in a way civilized society expects civilized people to behave.  I am talking about what only a few people might openly discuss in public but what the majority of folks have in their mind and choosing to keep it there because in a nutshell what we have today and where we are is captured in the following anonymous quote:

“The world is a magical place full of people waiting to be offended by something.”

Perhaps not exactly “full of people” but this is what makes it so ironic because it is actually not the majority of people who are so easily offended.  In fact, never has social behavior now being influenced by so few. I modified that phrase from and hereby thank Winston Churchill for his quote on a different subject.  Let me mention, of course, that although Churchill was not the first to be politically incorrect, he made that a sporting event during his career.  Centuries earlier Plato said the following,

“One of the penalties for refusing to participate in politics is that you end up being governed by your inferiors”.

That, as far as I know, is the earliest reference to being politically incorrect that happens to directly address politics.  We only have so few politicians, thank goodness, but that does not keep them from making the lives of the general population deliberately drastic.  And it gets worst when the very same population is curtailed from speaking out because:

“To learn who rules over you, simply find out who you are not allowed to criticize”. (Voltaire)

Since I am just musing here and hopefully you can go along with it, let us find out where this all started. We may begin at how our government functions. The public expectation is that whoever serves the taxpayers must focus some, if not most, of their efforts to disambiguate legalese so as to be easily understood by the average citizen.  Instead …

Bureaucrats started it all.

They began by filling the ranks of government bureaucracy with appointed, faceless, academics of every variety that turned the evolutionary path of language (English, in our case) to mud and quake sand. What they’ve achieved was to invent an exclusive world of “Bureaucratese”. 

For example, we found one such sentence like this to describe, “An act of a legislature authorizing money to be paid from the treasury for a specified use: “In 1977 the Pentagon tried slip funding for the neutron bomb unnoticed into an appropriations bill by calling it an enhanced radiation device”. Slip funding was, of course, a euphemism for hiding a budget item from close scrutiny. While a neutron bomb already sounded less lethal, enhanced radiation device made it looked even more benign. By the way, only in government where a simple word like cash or money is called a funding stream while a tax increase is enhanced revenue and we all know that when a politician calls for investing in this or that they actually mean spend on this or that. The military bureaucracy was very good at sugar coating what would otherwise be a weapon of mass destruction.  Rockets tipped with hydrogen bombs with a flight span that covers halfway around the globe were simply called ICBMs for Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles without ever having to say “bomb”.  And when there is a cluster of bombs at the tip of even more massive rockets that could hit several targets, the acronym MIRV came to mind, or Multiple Independently Targeted Re-entry Vehicle.  As we can see, bombs with the destructive power of many thousand tons of TNT sound like a space probe returning to earth; and indeed these rockets are launched into space only to come back down on a parabolic path to disperse several deadly nuclear warheads. These are all precursors to politically correct language. These were not too bad but it went downhill from there.  Two decades ago, government and scientific “experts were working in the anomaly investigation”.  That “anomaly investigation” was the explosion of the Space Shuttle ‘Challenger’.

Then we now have:

The Dis-Mantling of an otherwise Great Language

English is the ultimate survivor, proving to be the fittest and most efficient in the evolution of language.  If Latin was the dinosaur, English is the modern day bird. But now it is under indirect assault as a collateral victim of political correctness.  It is suffering from the unintended consequence of a misplaced effort at propriety.  I’ll make an example of the military once more because once it used to have immunity from “gender-mandering”.  I made that up from gerrymandering – a political ploy to manipulate a districting advantage for a political purpose.

The U.S. military just recently mandated the revision of certain military ranks, such as the abolishment in the Marine Corps the designation of Infantryman to Infantry Marine. That is just one of already several changes, with many more to come, as the military is being asked or required to remove from the rank male gender designations that, up to this point, had prevailed through centuries of military tradition. Soon the once unambiguous meaning of military manpower may no longer suffice.  So far, but perhaps not for very long, the Naval Academy may have to revise the designation of midshipman which has always been a rank for everyone enrolled there for over two centuries. Today, whether male or female at the U.S. Naval Academy he or she is a midshipman by rank. Arguably at some future time it is not too farfetched to anticipate that application forms for military service may have to be revised from when it used to have either of two box options to check, M or F for male or female applicants to now having to choose from six boxes. And we better not pretend to not know what the additional four boxes are for.

Will future dictionaries and reference books be several pages lighter because words like maneuver, manage, manipulate, mandate, demand, even mentor, and many more will be expunged? And, is it all right to keep mendacity because it connotes something only men are capable of doing? This is just musing, mind you, but who would have thought that infantryman as a rank can be so discriminatory?  I can add more but let your imagination come up with more threatened words in English.

Are we getting closer to George Orwell’s “1984” thought police?  Not yet but we definitely have “Newspeak”.  There is a glossary of Newspeak that the book defined so clearly but in a doublethink way.  If you’re confused by that that is exactly what an Orwellian world is like. You see, “Doublethink is the act of simultaneously accepting two mutually contradictory beliefs as correct, often in distinct social contexts”.  Observe very carefully when politicians talk, particularly answers given by the current President. It gets eerie because from the book we read, “A thought-crime is an occurrence or instance of controversial or socially unacceptable thoughts,” or when a face-crime is an indication that a person is guilty of thought-crime based on their facial expression.  I am not making this up – these are from “1984”, written in the aftermath of WWII. Facial expression could today simply be someone’s unspoken reaction to what he or she thinks of the new age social value or liberal behavior that the few and the elite have begun to embrace. Face-crime and thought-crime were Orwellian as today’s liberal go-to phrase of bigotry once conservatives express disapproval of or disagreement with progressive ideas. It is very difficult to argue against “Newspeak” that uses what used to be a perfectly acceptable but profoundly deep expression of fear because when one harbors an opposite view or sentiment, one is adhering to xenophobia, homophobia, Islamophobia etc. Phobia used to be within the purview of psychological analysis; today it is another liberal’s Newspeak word – “duck-speak” – to speak without thinking.

George Orwell wrote the book because he actually feared for another totalitarianism to rise up, even as the demise of Hitler was thought to have been the end of it.  Totalitarianism or Leader-worship can only be possible today, despite the free flow of information, if that flow becomes monolithically unidirectional – when the media can be controlled. Big Brother – a very significant element in an Orwellian landscape – was thought to be a farfetched idea decades ago that is not so improbable anymore.  The new totalitarianism will employ Newspeak to control social and political behavior.

New Rules at the “Corporatory” and Universities

Over the last two decades or so millions of dollars had already been spent by corporations, school administrators and government agencies on diversity and sensitivity training.  This is because one day many years ago deep thinkers and academics and behaviorists recommended that such places of business and learning should adopt new sets of behaviors so as not to offend anyone. That about sums it up, doesn’t it? They simply ignored centuries of societal development arrived at by natural progression of good behavior, which brought us today’s civilization. In other words, bad conduct and crude behavior have a way of self-annihilation because the general population will reject them in the end.  Forcing behavior upon society by the elite and self-appointed intellectuals to determine ethical or just simply refined behavior in the eyes of the few is usually not effective.  Totalitarian societies have always failed.

We know it has gotten out of hand when we hear folks warning and correcting for micro-aggression or demanding safe space for people deemed to be vulnerable to deep emotional hurt because of what they hear or see.  Those phrases should be called out for what they are – versions of “Newspeak” from “1984”.  We are not talking about racist or bigoted comments that these vulnerable individuals claim to suffer from.  Just wearing a T-shirt or cap endorsing a candidate or commentary criticizing any kind of social agenda or ideology at a university cafeteria or campus activity is being micro-aggressive. Saying something about anything but well within the rights to free speech, protected by the First Amendment, could be construed as an invasion of safe space of certain individuals who happen to hear or see them.

Another Newspeak is black-white- The ability to accept whatever "truth" the party puts out, no matter how absurd it may be. Orwell described it as "...loyal willingness to say black is white when party discipline demands this. It also means the ability to believe that black is white, and more, to know black is white, and forget that one has ever believed the contrary."

What used to be one sovereign nation’s prerogative to protect its border is now labeled xenophobia, or emigre-phobia. People should realize that attaching phobia to almost anything liberals can think of is Newspeak.  Newspeak is the liberal’s most potent weapon against other people’s ideas or beliefs.

George S. Patton was a brilliant commander and patriot but much of his accomplishments were sometimes overshadowed by his politically incorrect statements. 

He said this, “Politicians are the lowest form of life on earth …”

I push back a little bit on that because indeed it is not true of every politician.  They have a role in a democracy and they provide continuance of policies or revisions of such, succession and stability in the functioning of government.  However, today many of them fall into using Newspeak because that is what gets votes and political incorrectness could be a lethal political blow to their career.  But if we continue to find that acceptable and acquiesce to too much political correctness we will be followed by a generation of extremely social and political compromisers.  A weakened society is one that is gripped by fear of expressing an opinion because someone may be offended.  The founding fathers offended a very powerful world power at that time and had they stayed politically correct this nation may not have been born. 

Here is another Anonymous quote:

“PC stands for:

1)      Politically Correct or

2)   Petrified Chicken … meaning … so frozen with fear that they don’t even know they’re petrified chicken!

 I end with a quote from another famous general of the Greatest Generation:

“History fails to record a single precedent in which nations subject to moral decay have not passed into political and economic decline. There has been either a spiritual awakening to overcome the moral lapse or a progressive deterioration leading to ultimate national disaster”.

General Douglas MacArthur

Speak but not newspeak,

The Idle Mind

The Year of the Monkey

I know very little about the Chinese Zodiac sign but this I know – I was born on the Year of the Dog and 2016 is the Year of the Monkey. (They happen to be my two favorite animals).  I was at a local Chinese grocery store early this year on the eve of Super Bowl 2016, which also happened to precede the Chinese New Year.  I just had two packets of frozen banana leaves and a couple of cans of coconut milk for a cassava dessert I was going to make for the Super Bowl party we were hosting at home.  The “10 items or fewer” checkout was lined with people snaking all the way from the produce section. I am recalling this episode now because we’re halfway through 2016 and I am somewhat alarmed at what is going on around the world.

Striking up a conversation while waiting, I asked the guy in front of me, who was Chinese, about the coming Chinese New Year.  As is known, the Chinese Zodiac sign has a year’s worth of portent as opposed to the daily or monthly presages of the western horoscopy.  While I am not one to subscribe to the predestined path that is determined by an animal attached to each year of the 12-year cycle, I asked him what he thought the New Year had in store. He told me that the Year of the Monkey is often a harbinger of bad omen.  Another Chinese at the 24-Hour Fitness that I happened to chat with a few days later also said the same thing.  According to her, what came to mind was the recent earthquake that devastated Taiwan, where she’s from, and the economic travails that ail China today etc.  “What does that say about the upcoming U.S. election?” I asked. She shrugged her shoulder and that was about the extent of her response. How about the zika virus outbreak in South America and the Summer Olympics in Rio de Janeiro?  Then, we hear the drop in oil prices that most thought was a good thing is partly to blame for much of the trouble in the global economy.  So, what is going on?

Buried in the middle section of newspapers and as an aside in a radio broadcast I noticed stories that animal rights activists have taken up recently as their current cause celeb.  It is about macaque monkeys employed as forced labor in Thailand, Malaysia and Indonesia as coconut gatherers.  I read that chances are 95% of the coconut milk at any grocery store comes from coconuts gathered by these hapless primates that more than having opposable thumbs like we have, they can do with their feet what we can’t with ours – they have opposable toes equally adept at grabbing things.  It got my attention because I am a regular buyer of coconut milk.  A quick search produced a good number of YouTube videos showing exactly how the monkeys are trained to do their human masters’ bidding of gathering coconuts. Below are the links to those videos:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8gWEsNL-RJc

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tf8mbxR2LQM

The videos are meant to be both informative and amusing (although perhaps not to the animal rights folks) and one cannot help but be awed by how well the monkeys do the job.  In some places tourists pay good money to watch them in action. There are all kinds of statistics on their productivity as I came to find out but what is certain is that the monkeys are far more proficient by as much as ten to one better than the human gatherer for the same amount of time working the coconut groves.  Then there is the fact that the monkeys do not need very much by way of compensation; they are not known to complain or threaten to form a union; their housing accommodations are very minimal, to say the least; and they certainly cannot sue or file for grievance.  I read too that monkeys engaged as coconut gatherers live much longer than their counterparts in the wild.  It too is true though that only young macaques that exhibit traits of promise go on to become professional gatherers, so to speak, while less talented ones are sold as pets.

But there is a dark side, according to animal rights activists.

Much had already been said of the inhumane treatment of monkeys at medical and scientific laboratory test facilities.  The pharmaceutical industry is a constant target of activists.  Using them for forced labor might seem ethically benign and certainly a lot less stressful to the collective conscience of the general public but the activists feel very strongly against the whole idea of forcing an animal that has 98% of our DNA to work against its will.  The activists complain too about elephant labor and how some beasts of burden are treated: water buffalo tilling farmlands in Asia; pack animals like Mongolian yaks and reindeer, etc.  I have not heard much complaint about eagles that are trained by Mongolians to hunt prey animals and what about falconry? They all fall within the exploitation of animals for the benefit of humans.  As a side note, let me mention that the domestication of the horse is credited with advances in agriculture and transportation and more importantly the rapid exploration of the open lands and spread of civilization in pre-mechanized era. But I digressed.

The year of the monkey, is a harbinger of bad things?  The ancient Greeks used to describe the basic elements as Earth, Water, Air and Fire.  A Chicago rock band named itself, “Earth, Wind and Fire”, and they indeed played in a Greek theater sometime in 2004.  I really don’t know where I was going with that one but I thought I’d mention it, if only to say that whoever of the band members who came up with the name knew his ancient Greek history.  I digressed again.

I learned that the Chinese version of the basic elements include Metal, which makes it one more than what the Greeks had. Their five are Metal, Water, Wind, Fire and Earth.  What then does the Year of the Monkey bring to world events?

 “According to Chinese Five Elements Horoscopes, Monkey contains Metal and Water. Metal is connected to gold. Water is connected to wisdom and danger. Therefore, we will deal with more financial events in the year of the Monkey. Monkey is a smart, naughty, wily and vigilant animal. If you want to have good return for your money investment, then you need to outsmart the Monkey. Metal is also connected to the Wind. That implies the status of events will be changing very quickly. Think twice before you leap when making changes for your finance, career, business relationship and people relationship.”

So, based on my limited conversation on the subject which I mentioned earlier with the couple of folks who seemed to know, the referendum result in England to leave the EU adds to the ominous portent that can befall the world. Should we worry?

Let’s see, the last time it was the Year of the Monkey was 2004.  I already mentioned that the rock band, Earth, Wind & Fire, played in Greece that year.  Bill Clinton had a heart bypass surgery and it was a success.  A 97 year old woman was found alive in the aftermath of an earthquake in Iran and five days later a man was also found alive from the same quake.  Those were the good news. But there were a number of disasters, not the least of which was the earthquake in Indonesia that produced one of the worst tsunamis the world had witnessed in modern history.  It devastated long coastlines around the area, including the beach resort area in Thailand.  The total death toll from the affected areas around the Indian Ocean exceeded 200,000!  That happened right at the last days of the year.

244 pilgrims died from the Hajj stampede in Saudi Arabia, an earthquake in Morocco killed 300 people, over 1,000 people died when hurricane Jeanne hit Haiti, there were plane crashes and supermarket fires, etc.  2004 had its share of disasters.  We should really worry about this Year of the Monkey, shouldn’t we? 

However, we should keep in mind though that WWI, WWII and the 1929 Stock Market Crash that brought the Great Depression did not begin or occur in the years of the Monkey.  In fact, we can say that each year of the modern world has had its share of catastrophic events – natural and man-caused.

Let me digress for a bit again.  What I would like to know is what year was it when the Mount Everest-size asteroid slammed into what is now the Yucatan Peninsula in the Gulf of Mexico sixty seven million years ago.  Oh, but wait, there was no calendar then yet, no Chinese calendar, for certain.  But, can we extrapolate?  No, that’s too much work, of course. It was a really bad year for the dinosaurs. It had to have been the most devastating experience in climate change the world had ever seen, through the eyes of the then dominant species on earth. Their extinction began soon after that, after over 160 million years of raw dominion over all living things.  But it was great news for the tiny mammals which up to that point in time occupied a very insignificant niche in a landscape dominated by giant creatures. Those mammals subsisted mainly on insects or vegetation on forest floors and crevices and it was likely that their activities were limited at nightfall. Fast forward to many millions of years later and here we are – the most able descendants of those mammals that were no bigger than today’s squirrels.  Smaller dinosaurs did survive and we still see them today as lizards, iguanas and alligators but others even had loftier ambitions, not content with just climbing the evolutionary ladder, they flew off the ground: today’s birds! 

The Yucatan asteroid impact may have put an end to the rule of the mighty dinosaurs but you will not be reading about this had the evolutionary road remained unchanged. From those early mammal ancestors arose the general branch of species called primates – lemurs, tarsiers, monkeys, apes and us, humans. Let us be clear about this.  We, humans, did not come from monkeys or apes. Consider primates as a big branch that split into prosimians (where lemurs belong) and simians; the latter is split into apes, monkeys and hominids (where modern humans developed from).  While primates are generally defined to have relatively larger brains (brain size relative to body weight) than all other mammals, humans dominate that category.  That is why, except for Antarctica, humans inhabit all corners of the world while the other primates are mostly concentrated in tropical environments.

Where am I going with this?  We share 50% of our DNA with a banana but 98 % of our DNA is shared with monkeys and apes (which, by the way, include gorillas and orangutans).  Animal testing and research are what they are.  Inhumane, we are told by animal rights groups, but should it be less inhumane if we applied the tests directly into human subjects from the get go?  In the last five years alone 10 Nobel Prizes for medicine were awarded to researchers and scientists whose contribution to medicine were formulated from laboratory testing on animals that ranged from mice, frogs, rabbits, dogs and cattle and yes, monkeys.  In the past, small pox vaccines were developed using cows, but polio and rubella vaccines, and most notably advances in AIDS medication, just to name a few, came from research and experiments using monkeys. By the way, advances in veterinary medicine were developed out of research and experiments using animals.  A couple of days ago Perdue, a huge producer of poultry meat, announced that it is reforming its animal welfare policies.  Animal rights activists were largely responsible for this and many other improvements in the treatment of animals.

Among other traits that separate humans from animals are our capacity for compassion and it is because of that unique characteristic that voices from animal rights groups and animal ethicists are being heard. This has brought about humane treatment of animals in laboratories and food production (meat and poultry), farming, hunting and entertainment.  The death of a zoo gorilla had, in fact, gotten more sustained coverage than dozens of human deaths that occur every day on the streets of Chicago, Detroit, Sao Paolo or Fallujah.

After what had gone on during the first half, should we be worrying too much about the remaining half of the year?  Even as I declare that I am not putting too much stock on the symbolic significance of the animal-related-12 year-cycle of Sheng Xiao, here I am with a discombobulated musing on the Year of the Monkey.  All we can hope for is that the world’s leaders, soon to be chosen ones here and everywhere else, pick cleverness and smarts of the Monkey and not the mischief and bad portents it is associated with.  Didn’t I just say I don’t put much stock into it?  Oh, well, I am hedging my bets. 

   

There was a Book Sale …

It had been awhile since I last visited our local library, which had been closed for renovation although I had already cut down my trips there even before the work had begun.  I still read and my use of the library has not diminished.  What changed was that I serendipitously discovered e-books.  The county library, steeped in the tradition of brick and mortar, took some time to embrace the electronic medium of acquiring and lending books.  I’m sure budgetary considerations were a factor and the median age of its users – a good number of whom, like me, couldn’t let go of the old traditional way of reading where one actually has to flip pages and use book marks.  Apparently, e-books were not a priority for the library system and its patrons, I suppose.

Earlier, kindle and tablets to me, for a very long time, meant fire starter and headache pills.  Then I heard of a much acclaimed book - “The Martian” - that was made into a movie - which the author published online for free.  So, I said to myself, “I better hitch on to this e-book reading thing”, if I wanted to read it.  Just then the local library opened their electronic bookshelves, not with too much fanfare because until I inquired at the front desk I never heard of it. So, I signed in and voila I was connected to the ether world of bibliotheca from the cloud.

What brought me to the library this time, after it had just recently re-opened, was to sort of circumvent the system.  I had checked out an e-book, “The Girl on the Train”, but failed to finish it within the 14-day period as my schedule got hectic by a short out-of-town trip and some wood working projects that needed to be finished.  It is a popular book so there was no renewal to accommodate the long waiting list.  I hedged my bet by reserving a hard copy as well several days earlier when I knew I couldn’t finish the e-book.

Last Saturday the library pinged my phone of my good fortune that the hard copy book was ready for checkout.  So I got in my car to make the four mile trip.  The parking lot was packed! There was a book sale.  I thought I’d saunter in to the hall where the book sale was humming with book mongers and bargain hunters before proceeding to the main lobby counter to pick up the book.

There they were – books past their utility to entertain, or had overstayed their welcome at their owner’s tightly packed bookshelves or for any number of other reasons.  I browsed and was surprised to see these books in excellent condition.  Some were New York bestsellers only a year ago.  A good number of them still had their glossy dust jackets.  These were books that once graced the display tables at Barnes & Noble, the toasts of critics, or were so eagerly awaited by readers across the country from any town with a Post Office or accessible by UPS or Fedex; therefore, within reach by Amazon.  Tons of books today come that way.  But now some of them were there at the book sale, discarded by their original readers, donated for free to the library and are being re-sold for pennies to the dollar.  Books are that easily discarded these days.

Each table was well labeled for every genre.  There was a complete volume set of Sherlock Holmes mysteries and there were children’s books and self-help or self-improvement books.  I was kind of surprised at the number of cook books.  Have the previous owners mastered them or have they simply gone on from Chinese and Vietnamese or country style barbecue to now experimenting with Indian or Afghan cuisine?  But get this.  There was almost an equal number of diet and exercise books. I am almost certain the cook books and diet books were not given up by the same donors.  A real surprise was the number of massive Tom Clancy novels that were there. His books average about a quarter million words per novel.  Some of the books still had tightly packed pages in them, which seem to indicate that the previous readers/owners were finicky page turners or they just simply gave up at 2/3 of the stories, not being able to deal with the convoluted plots of characters and places and techno-warfare jumping in and out of every chapter.  No, I’m sure the previous readers finished the stories.  There were a number of Sue Grafton’s “alphabet” thrillers.  I have not read any of her books and she’s down to the last two letters of the alphabet.  She just published, “W – is for wasted” and a one-letter title, “X” (no clever add-on phrase since what good is xenon or xylophone to a murder mystery).  It won’t be long before we get to, I guess, “Z – is for zero suspect”.  I’ll wait when she gets down to the Greek alphabets, with perhaps, “Alpha – is for alibi”.  How’s that for a suggestion to Ms. Grafton’s first Greek alphabet series?

It was tempting to let go of a few dollars.  For ten bucks or less I was going to have a stack for much of my summer reading.  The Sherlock Holmes volume set was going to be a good one to give to the grand kids when they get to the age when logical thinking will be something to try once video games lose their allure.  I’m not sure of it but I hope their parents will indeed keep them away from video games.  I decided against the purchase because I figured by the time the grand kids do some serious reading they will be going for e-books, or some other yet but soon to be invented medium of spreading information and reading material.  I left the hall empty handed.

I went to the counter ready with my library card in my hand – there’s a big sign that tells you to do just that because they don’t want you fumbling for it from your wallet when you get there as that would take up a few seconds of the busy schedule of the other patrons waiting behind you.  I sled my card towards the lady behind the counter announcing politely that I had a reserved book.  As practiced before, she would scan your card and without saying much she’d turn and walk towards the back room and in less than a minute she’d be back with your book/books and you’re done. 

Well, the library now had a new system for checking out reserved books. She motioned me to go somewhere first. The “back room” is now three long shelves at the center of the library behind the information desk. I was to go there and find the book myself.  Books there were on shelves not arranged according to the familiar Dewey Decimal System but alphabetically according to the last names of the borrowers. Making use of my mental acuity, I went to the section labeled with the first letter of my last name. Lo and behold, there on one of the books was my name on a piece of white paper stuck between the pages.  Those demanding the higher minimum wage should now understand that it is just a matter of time when customers at a fast food restaurant will soon be picking up their orders from the kitchen in the back.  There they will pick up the cooked patty off the hot plate into the face up buns, put the condiments on, after which they either pick up a paper plate or paper bag, depending on whether they were dining in or taking it out.  Fast food customers have for ages been serving sodas themselves so there will be no change there.

I picked up the book and went back to the counter.  Not right away because there were now about eight people ahead in line.  When my turn came I confessed to the lady about not finishing the e-book so I was borrowing the hard copy.  I did not expect her to respond to that. She didn’t but she did say this, “Well, soon if the trend goes towards e-books we will be saving a lot of trees, won’t we?” She was smiling, so I assumed she was just kidding.  Then again she may have been serious about saving trees. She looked like the environmentalist type.

How about that, we’ll save trees with e-books! Soon my idling mind revved up to a higher gear, switching quickly to the implications of e-books.  Saving trees is a distinct if not profound possibility that will potentially reverse the current trend of deforestation, flooding and the balding of mountains.  But then, what could possibly go wrong?

For one thing, Barnes & Noble will have to close shop; Amazon will need to find a good chunk of bulk sales to make up for books now being peddled through the ether; the time to retire some cargo planes at UPS and Fedex will have to come much sooner; some paper mills and printing companies will come down to a few survivors; and worst of all the rank of the unemployed will swell, and so on and on.  Are these the unintended consequences of e-books?

From the space station, or its replacement at some future time, astronauts will see a very deep green-in-blue planet earth as mountains and plains abound with trees.  We can dream, can’t we?  Because this assumes the population of people has stood still at a mere seven billion and livestock kept at minimum because vegetarianism is on the rise.  But let’s make that scenario, anyway.

For trees to flourish in that scenario there should be plenty of carbon dioxide in the air to support their needs. We may not have that much today with just the existing number of cars and fossil fuel-burning power plants, so it must be supplemented perhaps by more than the occasional volcanic eruptions to insure CO2 sufficiency in the air. We will need one Krakatoa every six months. (The last time in earth’s history when there was hardly any ice on either pole, perhaps the greenest period of time when vegetation was dense, was during the Eocene epoch – 56 to 39 million years ago.  It was also marked by frequent volcanic activity).  But here’s the thing.  As trees gulped CO2 they will expel oxygen.  With the existing population of people and other air breathing animals, there may not be enough to consume all the oxygen to keep it at the level it is today.  So the oxygen in the atmosphere could exceed 21% to maybe 30%?  That has a potential to change the atmospheric makeup of the air with hazardous consequences!  But nature will do what it needs to do.  It will cause more lightning strikes.  As oxygen level goes up, forest fires will be easy to start, burns hotter and will take longer to extinguish. But forest fires, in the aftermath, are precursors to more trees and plant growth and …

I can go on and on with these wild scenarios.  Who knows what else can happen that I haven’t worried about.  Then I realized that indeed my idle mind did rev up to high gear, or perhaps the oxygen level has come down a bit in the room.  Well, you can all rest easy. Get e-books and don’t worry about it.