Fear

"Fear is the mind killer." Frank Herbert, Dune
I am like my Dad in that I am a people watcher. He told me that he went to the horse races for 3 reasons. One, to watch the horses and two, to watch the people. It is fascinating. Just be subtle. It is rude to stare.
I have been traveling around a bit of late. Too much, really, but that is another story for another time. I have noticed a vast change in my fellow Americans. People are scared to death. Few seem willing to just open up and be alive. Folks seem closed in and shut off. You can see it in their eyes and in their ,mannerisms. Tension, a rigid nervous smile, an embarrassment when they actually laugh. Many no longer answer when you say hello and strangers will not meet your eyes when you smile and nod at them in the streets. Even among those you know, there is a reluctance to talk about anything of any substance.
In masses, people will rant and rave in the midst of useless demonstrations, but, one on one, they will duck disagreements. If you differ, they nod and grunt  and quickly change the subject, or just move away. Trust me, this is not the way we used to be. You know, back when America really was great.
Why so timid? Why so afraid of difference? Why so willing to freeze up except in large groups engaged in mindless, irrational acts of fury?
The answer is, for once, simple. Fear. We are in a period of rapid change. This has been the case for about 60 year. In my time, we have gone from a time when TV was almost a novelty to all the wonders, and horrors, of the internet. We have seen the collapse pf vast empires like the Soviet Union and the rise of people who not long ago were desert nomads to a to a terrifying World power that fights a warfare that has no battles, just hit and run attacks. We have cone from an era of sexual limits to an era where folks think you can di what you want without consequences. In medicine, we went from prosthetics that were mostly cosmetic to finely tuned instruments that can function as well, or sometimes better, than our natural parts. We went to the Moon and are actively exploring the linits of the Solar System
. I could go on and on,  but you get the point.
Change is the only constant, but we have never seen change at this rate. Some of these changes are good, some bad, and, as always, most are in the grey zone. Humans are always nervous about change. This is foolish, but that insecurity is real. Most just don't deal well with it. Now, the change is so fast, that many cannot cope. Why do you think we have so many psychoactive drugs being handed out by doctors and so many illegal opiates being consumed. We are scared to death, and that leads back to the opening quote. Fear is the mind killer.
Humans must learn to accept change at any pace. Just realize that everything is always changing every second and that what you are seeing now is the same thing at a much larger and faster scale. To fear, to withdraw is a horrible strategy. Do not be overwhelmed. Accept what you think is right, reject the rest and then stand up, proud and brave and fearless and get on with things. Like the old Little Feat song, roll with it.
This is not that hard to do. Trust that your Creator will catch you when you fall and help you in every way. To those who do not believe in our Creator, you have a problem. The strength and support God will give you is unfathomable. Without it, you are a puny animal. With it, you are a noble, conscious being. Unbelievers, you may want to reconsider that. Remember, the first thing that angels say when, in the Bible, they contact people,e is Fear Not. Heed those words and have a grand and Blessed day.

America on Line - Part 1

I stated in my last blog that I love technology, but that comes with a disclaimer. I love technology that is subjugated to human interests. More and more, I believe that we are allowing technology to dominate us.

Stephen King wrote a great story called The Tommyknockers which featured, as the villains a race of extraterrestrials who loved to tinker and build great gadgets, even though they didn't understand the science behind them and had no real purpose in building them. They just tinkered and mindlessly built a lot of junk and found uses for some of it. Of course, being a King novel, the uses were evil.

Are we much different? We build great electronic gear, but we still, if we are honest, really don't know what electricity is. We can say it is moving electrons, but, while we can describe some aspects of those electrons and use mathematics to explain some of their motions, we cannot say just what an electron is and its motions are, according to quantum mechanics, kind of sketchy. But, we build and build and a lot of the stuff we build is pretty useful.

So we have made machines of greater and greater complexity, all the while assuring ourselves that all would be to our benefit. It is not. Humans need to work, to be active, and here and there, to feel creative. We all love to complain about working but let me assure you, having recently gone through it, not having a job to go to each day is incredibly disorienting. Retirement is not easy to get used to even when you have reached the appropriate age.

Thanks to advances in technology, folks who have trained to do certain jobs, who take pride in their work, are being replaced by advances in technology. I recently read about the people who were working in Eastman Kodak's facility in Rochester, NY. The rise in digital technology which had led to the ubiquitous smart phone pictures  has put them out of work. There are those who say that they just need to retrain and get new jobs, but what is there to do? Robotics have streamlined production to the point that few real humans need to do much and, as time passes, robots will do most everything. We will become a Nation of burger servers and Uber drivers  and it will hit other, poorer countries harder. In Third World countries, folks work for next to nothing making clothes. What will happen when machines are sophisticated enough to measure, cut, and stitch material? If that cannot yet be done, hang in, it will be soon. Actually, I may be behind the times, and machines may be now making our clothes, things change so fast it is hard to keep up.

What will happen in those countries when people who are willingly working for slave wages are told they no longer will even have that? Heck, what will happen in this country? Corporations will tell you that they are responsible to investors and must find the lowest ways to produce their goods. I guess eliminating people altogether and sticking with robotics, from that view point is the way to go.

But what of the billions who are just eking by? What will they do? Well, pay attention folks, because here is where things get weird. Look up, on your computer, The Georgia Guidestones. This monument, paid for by some anonymous donor, seems to be a statement of purpose, a plan for recreating the World, and one of its goals is to limit the World's population to 500000000, a half billion. To get there would require eliminating about 6 billion humans. Now, I have trouble believing that the sponsors of this program are going to patiently wait for birth control to lower the population. And this is not just the work of some loan, rich nut. Other groups have echoed similar sentiments, many of them men and women with great power and influence. Think David Rockefeller kind of rich and influential.

How will those goals be accomplished? I don't have a clue, bur I am fairly sure that it won't be pleasant. Sometimes I think that the primary way will be to simply convince everyone that they are meaningless and let angry despair set off a wide range of disasters. This is some, not all, but some, of the driving force behind the great allure of terrorism. If someone feels worthless, the idea of pleasing some angry deity by killing themselves and others becomes a little more understandable.

So next time you think of how great all your gadgets are and how wonderful our computerized world is, think again. All things in this world are a blend of good and evil. Any thing that purports to be a great boon to man will come with a Devil's Price. What will the future bring? Who knows? Remember Frank Herbert's book, Dune. The story is set in a time when man, tired of being ruled by machines has rebelled and fought a long war against the robots, finally winning and banning thinking machines forever.

In Part 2, I will talk a bit more about what our compulsive use of technology is doing to our souls. Remember, technology is fine, as long as we remain the bosses.

America and Fear - Part 2

Change breeds fear; that is only natural. In the last blog, I touched on some of the silly ways technology changed, silly, but useful and important, and silly but, in odd ways, disturbing and disorenting. Now, let's get a bit more serious.                               

 Only 150 years ago, a blip in the history of humanity, we fought the Civil War. Wars, in the European tradition were almost gentlemanly affairs. The Civil War changed that. With modern equipment, battles were turned into slaughters and men were killed and crippled at a horrific rate. Anilhilation seemed the goal, as evidenced by Sherman's March to the Sea, a dispicable act in which he burned everything in site as he passed through the South.  

Afterword, Americans, understandibly lost their taste for war. The Spanish war barely counts and left many Americans embarrassed at our obvious imperialism. We did not want WW1 and were promised by President Wilson that we would stay out. However, the Powers that Be had other notions and we were manipulated into fighting, and it was far worse than the Civil War, unthinkably nightmarish. Keep in mind that this was but 100 years ago.  

Then we were subjected to a ridiculous bit of social engineering, Prohibition. No alcohol was allowed and while that didn't slow down people's drinking, it gave rise to organized crime. Until then, the Mafia was mostly into loan sharking and extortion. Prohibiton gave them a new way to make money and they made a lot. It also gave them a structure that later became the basis for the Nation's drug trafficking.       

Booze was relegalized just in time for the Great Depression. Now we are within 80 years of the present. Some who went through that are still alive. Look at the old photos from that time. Once proud, hard working men were reduced to begging and haunting soup kitchens. There was little work and if you had a job, you worked dirt cheap. Some good came out of the mess. Labor laws were tightened and Unions gained strength, so when the economy finally rebounded, the common man had actually made some gains.              

Then after again being promised by President Roosevelt that we would not fight in Eurpoe, the Powers that Be again showed that they were pulling the strings and we ended up in WW2 an affair that made WW1 look like a stroll through the park on a sunny spring afternoon. We won, but at great cost. Still, Americans showed great resolve and the newly thriving middle class went home and got busy.                                                          

That was all great, but there was one thing. Well, actually a few, but they were all linked. At the end of the war, Truman ordered the dropping of the atomic bomb, sort of a punctuation mark telling the world that, ready or nor, the war was over. But, our much mis-trusted ally, the Soviet Union was said to have developed their own bomb and was building an arsenal at an alarming rate and that, since they were dispicably evil Comminusits, that we had to be ready to fight their looming threat. We got all of this from spies. However, in a fit of lunacy, our brand new CIA had hired the old  Nazi spy ring, who were thought to have agents deep in Russia, to conductr intellighence operations. Nothing much was really going on, and the ex-Nazis knew that the only way they were going to avoid being hanged for war crimes was by producing results, so they did the logical thing, they lied. (this by the way, is not conjecture, it has been acknowledged by our government and by the ex-Nazis). They told tales of great atomic arsenals and emminent invasions and, so we were launched into the Cold War. We also had a hot war in Korea and to this day, I have never heard a rational explanation for that war. Yeah, we were opposing Communism, but we offered no alternative. We were backing an aging, cruel, corrupt, war lord who the Koreans hated, But, fight we did, until the whole mess just sort of ran out of steam and both sides went back to the way things were before we needlessly killed a bunch of their folks and got a bunch of our own kids killed.                                                                                                             

Now, we are only 60 years removed from the present and the threat of possible nuclear anihilation was held over our heads. It worked, in that we allowed the Government to spend unthinkable amounts on military build up. However, it scared the crap out of everyone. Useless and expensive backyard bomb shelters were built and kids in grade school  were taught that if we saw a sudden flash, we should duck and cover. We had drills wher we practiced ducking uder our desks and covering our eyes. We used to add a third step. Duck, cover, and kiss your ass goodbye. Funny in retrospect, but such a morbid sense of humor is not becoming in kids.     

Then in rapid order, we had the Cuban Missle Crisis, in which we almost did use those nukes, the Kennedy Assassination, the Civil Rights upheaval, the RFK Assassination, the MLK Assassination, and the debacle that was Viet Nam ( just like Korea, I have never heard a rational argument for why we had that war) and all of the accompanying student unrest, which culminated in the sight of National Guard troops shooting unarmed protestors at Kent State. No  wonder LSD seemed like a good idea, it was about the only way to get as crazy as those running the country seemed to be. Again, we are now only 50 yeras from the present.     

Many of us, by this time, didn't have much of a clue what was happening, but we, battered and bruised, hung in and staggered into the 70s, 80s and 90s, times when it seemed like some technology loving fairy had waved a magic wand over us, and we found ourselves cranking out new gadjets at a phenomenal rate. Just when you got used to something, it became obsolete. Now, that is certainly better than facing instant destruction on a minute by minute basis. Still, constant change is disorienting and folks simply couldn't find a bit of solid ground to stand on. In the next blog, I will look at those decades in more depth