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Progressive News & Views (since 1982)
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L I F E and my brother (7)
Life is pretty lousy for most of the people on the planet. Do you
think those who are miserable all their lives, who like many on this
planet live like animals, scavenging for morsels of food and a card
board box or piece of tin for shelter, are as attached to their lives
as much as we are? Do you think they would mind blowing themselves up
if they thought in the after-life they would not be hungry? Surely
this while not the primary reason for terrorism is certain motivation
for some to volunteer to get out of this life.
"Despite pledges made at three major international conferences on food
since 1974, about 36 million people are still dying from hunger
directly or indirectly every year, Jean Siegler, special rapporteur of
the U.N. Commission on Human Rights, said Monday. Siegler, who
authored the 15-page report, says that millions of people continue to
suffer from hunger or are driven to early death from starvation and
chronic malnourishment."
* Thalif Deen, Inter Press Service English News Wire; 10/29/2002 -
"U.N. says rich nations fail pledge to end world hunger"
"Every seven seconds a child under 10 years of age dies from the
direct or indirect effects of hunger. Malnutrition handicaps children
for life -- brain cells do not develop, bodies are stunted, and
blindness and diseases become rife." (Deen)
"All this happens, he says, in a world that already produces more than
enough food to feed the global population. "Hunger is not a question
of fate; hunger is the result of human action or inaction," he adds."
(Deen)
Evolution is accepted by the most people and practically all
scientists as much as theories can become fact when there is enough
probability for it to be so and no other theory yet exists that would
contradict it - so most of us accept that Charles was right and we are
distant relatives of Lizards and more recent relatives of Chimpanzees.
We even have a pretty good idea about our solar system and we're
learning more all the time about the universe but it then gets to be
too complicated to wrap our minds around when we think about the
galaxy.
We know light beams are bombarding us at 186,000 miles a second, from
the sun which is 93 million miles away, where it is produced by
nuclear fussion, which our scientists can produce for only a few
seconds at a time, but not long enough to give us the energy of the
sun which would be a lot safer than what is now produced by nuclear
fission.
We know that our body's cells are metabolizing sugar (glucose) to keep
us at a constant temperature of almost 100 degrees, without which we
would die.
We know coffee keeps us more alert by constricting blood vessels with
a stimulant called norepinephrine is it is good for keeping blood
pressure regulated (according to a recent medical journal report) and
it also works well at reducing headaches. Hell, it may even be as good
for you as aspirin which we all should take at my age at least once a
day to keep our blood thiner and reduce heart attacks.
And we know that we are constantly being radiated by trillions of
subatomic particles called neutrinos and it doesn't hurt. When I think
about our planet speeding around the sun at more than half a million
miles an hour and about how fast my body is spinning like a top
because the earth is also spinning at about 18 miles a second and our
solar system spinning through our galaxy at 140 miles a second, and I
think a natural tendency would be to want to hold on to something to
keep from falling, but gravity keeps me up, whatever that is - because
we haven't exactly figured that one out yet. All of these things are
known science and are predictable.
It is even predictable that we will be hit by a rather large asteroid
sometime in the _near_ future.
Also predictable is entropy, that everything proceeds toward
unpredictability, disorder and chaos.
But where does our solar system expand to and what is this void? We
even understand why we die and we have the tools to do something about
it and someday we might even attain immortality just by growing organs
that wear out and altering our DNA.
My wife says why would we want to. You see when you get older you
start thinking about dying and why that might not be such a bad idea.
At least some do. I like myself enough to not want to even contemplate
that thought but something it just creeps up on me and I'm thinking
about it whether I wish to or not.
We don't have the answers to a lot of questions. We keep on looking
for them. That is because we can. Logical thinking started to improve
when it became necessary for us to enable us to survive but the
reality is we don't survive; we live though to enable our genetic code
to survive, that book of knowledge we're just now deciphering that we
all carry a copy of in our DNA.
So what about the void? Why is it there and what is it? There is much
we don't know but for certain there is nothing supernatural about
life. It is just all about protoplasm.
There are so many planets like ours that there must be other life.
Maybe it is so far away we may never know of it? But it hardly seems
possible that we are alone.
Almost surely anything out there is not going to look like us because
it would have had to adapt differently because of different gravity,
temperatures, gases, etc.
I use to think, or maybe want to think that we were reincarnated and
my mother came back as my dog who I talked to and called mother for
almost a year - but don't tell anybody please.
Whatever the answers are, I'm glad to be here now. I'm glad my dogs
are here and I'm glad for the relatively short time I get. I'd like to
think it doesn't end the way it does, that dying is like going to
sleep, but I know that isn't right and religion is not the answer.
Religion is the reason people can cope, it is like Valium, but it
isn't the answer. People kill each other over religion. People are not
afraid to die because of religion. Is that a good thing? I don't think
so.
I know that life is precious. And I spend a lot of time thinking about
it. I think each of us has worth to someone else and I'm not so
vainglorius to think that as a species we are any better than other life
we share this world with.
I think everything/everyone is valuable. I no longer hunt. I think it is
wrong to kill anything in spite of what gorillas do to baby gorillas and
what George Bush has been doing in Iraq.
We must care about them, if we care about us.
Maybe that is what
it all means?
Hank Roth
To Be Continued...
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