Wednesday, March 31, 2004

I had the haunting vision again of humans harvesting something from the planet for some higher being. NPR was doing a peace on the decline of small town America, and they spoke to the  mayor of Malta, Ohio, who talked about the fact that mainstreet once had 7 grocers - small ma and pa shops. While the connection to Walmarts is obvious - concentrating retail power and wealth into an ever diminishing percentage of elites, the impact of creating and supporting national brands for distribution across broad channels, even the system of centralized, national distribution, further squeezes out providers of smaller, regional brands. Manufacturing, retail, distribution all become further centralized, decimating small towns, removing jobs from their population base, forcing people to move into cities where, more and more, they become part of the service sector to support the wealthy elite. And in the cities, we drive everywhere, pollute, wealth becomes more concentrated, and so on. It makes me think of some social theorists suggesting that Mohammed was trying to diminish the power of rural nomads by contriving a ban on pork - taking away their livelihood and food - forcing them into the cities. Only here, we are the pigs being driven to market by memes and genes beyond our understanding, but tied as well to social strictures. I wonder if the very ideas of evil and good that manifest in our subconcious are actually remnants of our either past or future experience of salvation and redemption, visions of fire and cold associated with evil being representative of some encounter with the power for which we are burning up our atmosphere. Maybe even a remnant of the genetic code, the "virus," that our precursors fired off into space to "save" our species. Our ideas of god and good coming from experiences of escape. What if the enter perianatal experience realized in our visions of good and evil are also part of a warning mechanism itself, as if the genetics of our entity has determined a way to convey a warning to our entity of our impending doom - millions or billions or possibly sooner years away. What if those of us who work for a sustainable future for the planet are mutations, meme mutations that may eventually save the planet? 10:04:28 PM