Apple Cores

What do you suppose it means that I have three apple cores sitting on the desk in front of me?

I'll tell you what it means: you're a slob.

No. I mean at a more basic level, what does the presence of those apple cores say about who I am.

That you're a slob.

Come on. Step out of the box for a minute. I'm trying to have a philosophical conversation, here. At root, what do those three apple cores really represent.

They represent the fact that you're a slob, and that you're waiting for me to throw them out for you.

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11:19:07 PM   permalink: []   feedback:   comments: []  

Deluge

There was a time when we thought in terms of motion forward. A time when progress dominated our worldview. There was a time when optimism born of the enlightenment and advancements brought by science and discovery made us dare to dream of an ever-improving world.

We learned to fly. We learned to fight disease. We landed on the moon. We built tall buildings and long-spanned bridges. Our farms produced with great abundance. Our economy crept ever upwards. The Wall tumbled. The Cold War melted. We fought for civil rights. We thought peace had a chance.

Our eyes were on the mountain top, and we looked back at the past confident that we were headed into the light. The dark ages were behind us.

But today that dream is fading.

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Our airplanes have become weapons of mass destruction. Our medicines breed super germs. Our astronauts have never left Earth orbit again. Our tall buildings crumble. Our highways decay and rot, and where they do not they expand without bound.

Our farms are corporate factories. The farmers are all flocking to the cities, where the meager pieces of our economy remain, mainly dedicated to increasing corporate profits while living standards and real income fall. We've replaced the wall with fences of our own built of wire and tortured legal reasoning.

The post Cold War peace dividend has all been spent, and now we are running historical deficits again. The race-based divisions between us are being replaced by growing class disparities. The draft is returning. Peace now seems to have no chance.

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There was a time when we saw our world in a positive light and dared to think that we could extrapolate to an ever better one. But that time in the twentieth century was an anomaly, a brief spike in the data, a mere blip on the radar screen. We can think that way no more.

The dark ages are not only behind us; they are before us, too.

Voici le deluge.

3:34:46 AM   permalink: []   feedback:   comments: []