No Beginning or End

Scientists are beginning to understand and believe that there was no ONE big bang from whence we began!

For me that is easier to understand and believe than before THE big bang there was NOTHING.

Nothing is inconsistent with all aspects of ‘our’ universe. That fits comfortably even with the big spaces between stars (suns) planets and the rest of us.

Therefore, it begins to be possible to grasp that we humans are part of the same endless loop and its rules.

So, where are we now?

We are somewhere between when and where humans got so ‘smart’ that they almost ruined the chances to find what they really wanted.

Reflect on that for a moment.

What did/do humans really want?

Peace and prosperity!

How does that parse with the anger and fear that has been percolating growth for a decade at least?

The Trump period was built on the idea of white supremacy, which pitched to their believers that only if their white world prevailed could/would they find their peace and prosperity.

Their problem is that they overlooked ALL those non-whites, who reasonably have the same aims for peace and prosperity.

Thus, the question shifts to where we are on the endless loop in which all humans are struggling for the same thing.

The endless loop concept speaks loudly to me that the lesson for life today is to go with the flow in which ALL humans get their chances for more peace and prosperity and not to single out any clan for special treatment.

If EVERYONE ultimately sees that more peace and prosperity  for everyone, means more peace and prosperity for them too, we may turn a corner.

Short cuts are just that. They are short and they cut YOU out!

I published my first blog piece in December 2007 – an endorsement of Barack Obama. I wasn’t yet entirely sold on Obama – he was young and inexperienced and had suffered some early stumbles.

It is the closing argument of that piece that stands out now: “I believe Obama is in this race more for the country than himself.”

In retrospect, it was something of a throwaway line – while most all of our Presidents up to then had been men of huge egos and drive, they had also generally and genuinely shared a desire to use their time in office for the betterment of the nation (even while they disagreed fiercely about what, specifically, might make it better).

The Gross Orange Prevaricator (“GOP”) put an end to that, of course. By the time he was run out of town, the office of the presidency had been thoroughly corrupted into a wholly-owned subsidiary of Trump, Inc. – one that experienced its (attempted) crowning achievement in the deadly insurrection at the U.S. Capitol on January 6.

The emergence last year of a deadly global pandemic, combined with the willful incompetence of an administration concerned only with appearances, made our collective suffering exponentially graver, at a cost of more than half a million lives.

Along the way, my blogs touched on everything from physics (a reflection of my own personal fondness for matters of space and time) to parenting; reviews of books, hotels, restaurants and movies intermixed with explorations of history, economics, and the subject of perhaps my greatest fascination: human nature.

Rest assured, I still have more to say. But I now intend to be more selective. Much like the country itself, my life is entering a new phase. I retired from my role as CEO of the family business at the end of 2020 and celebrated my 90th birthday in February.

I am filled with hope and optimism, for myself and the nation, about what lies ahead. And I intend to enjoy whatever awaits us more than I’ve been able to enjoy the last five years (and especially the last twelve months!).

I expect, as I undertake the work of defining the rest of my life, that my blogs will be fewer. But I also hope they will be richer and deeper, more reflective of the meaning of events rather than reactions to the moment of them.

Whatever the future holds, I hope you will continue to share your thoughts, ideas and encouragements – and even your criticisms!

People who have done radio interviews or recorded podcasts know that the hardest part of it is “speaking into the void” – the medium offers no opportunity for feedback.

I’ve always cherished the willingness of quite a number of my readers to share something of themselves in response to something I’ve written.

We are, in the end, social creatures. If my blog wasn’t a two-way street, I would obtain less enjoyment from it.

So, thanks to those of you who have given me the motivation to carry on.

Or Not.

Why do we care?

Because we must plan ahead.

Rain on a wedding day brings tears, costs — even divorces.

Endless sun after crops are planted leads to drought and starvation.

Why aren’t we able to harness the weather into a more predictable process?

Of course, that might get boring — and deprive billions of a fallback subject for conversations that have dwindled to awkward silence.

After that, it might get contentious with political parties fighting and defending different forms of weather to make their constituents happy. (In a way, of course, this is already happening, with climate-change deniers favoring a hellscape of perpetual severe weather extremes.)

Finally, people would invent – then immediately start fiddling with – personal weather dials.  Unpredictable conflicts would begin to emerge when one person’s tropical paradise confronted another’s winter wonderland, wreaking havoc on morning commutes, dinner plans and the planet itself.

The weather is a way for nature to keep us humans in line. So, there will never be direct choices in weather – no “sunny day” on order. Given our predilection for extinction, that is almost certainly for the best.

Keeps me posted.

Not surprisingly my friend in space, jasdlk (the closest translation I can muster), is just as curious about me as I am about – well, we haven’t discussed gender, so I’ll use “they/them.” I know they are curious because the questions from my interstellar correspondent include how we have babies here. It turns out that, in that world, the old story parents here used to tell their kids about being brought to them by storks is TRUE!

jasdlk appears to be a space scientist whose goal is to transmit information at greater than the speed of light. They think that would close a lot of gaps in our knowledge about the universe. jasdlk also claims their world is close to achieving light-speed travel by hitching rides on photons. But that information is so sensitive that they cannot go into details. Interesting hmmmmm?

When I press jasdlk about what came before the big bang, I get some tantalizing gobbledygook about how there was never “a” big bang; rather, there have been endless bangs forever as one black hole after another gobbles up chunks of the universe and then spits it out into the multiverse.

I have asked my friend jasdlk how many others there are on their planet. The answer always comes back – ‘it depends.’ I struggle to find what it depends on and the answers are all over the place: the time, the temperature, neighborhood happenings – even the outcome of sporting events there seem to influence the matter somehow.

I have tried to explain the subject of language. But jasdlk doesn’t get it. They simply say you ‘look into the rear eye and see/hear everything in the other brain.’ Huh?

I have tried to share these ideas with astronomers and astrologists – they have doubted my reports and questioned my sanity (surprise, surprise) – though they accept the idea that there must be something out there.

I have tried to get them on my wavelength. But their ability to stay on always seems to be distracted by a new flash of radio signals.

I tell them that they need more curiosity AND imagination.

I invite those curious souls, from whatever galaxy they call home, to join me in imagining the lives of our interstellar neighbors.

What To Do?

The scene of a white cop physically killing a subdued black man is validly and rapidly becoming the icon of racism in American.

And then there’s Dr. Seuss.

Suess’s children’s’ books have been educating and amusing generations of well- brought up kids.

Now, some self-appointed geniuses noticed that a few of his drawings contained figures of Asian people, which they then labeled RACIST.

To my knowledge nothing of substance in any Seuss books ever approached overt intentional racism. Nevertheless, the author’s estate has decided to permanently remove six books from the market. Five you’ve likely never heard of, with one of his first — “And to Think that I Saw it on Mulberry Street”, from 1937 — rounding out the list.

Is it a good idea in battling racism to exaggerate and oversell?

It seems to me that trying to tag a dead writer as racist weakens the credentials of accusers and potentially does harm to the cause.

Suess worked in a time when there was not a wide awareness of racism as we know it well today. And, his writing (and perspective) shifted over the years, much as the country itself did. Later works like “Horton Hears a Who” (1954), “The Lorax” (1971) and “The Butter Battle Book” took on “otherness”, environmental protection and war and peace.

That, of course, is not an excuse—particularly if, in fact, Suess did harbor those feelings and thoughts. There is, though, no evidence of that.

While racism in all its forms must be challenged, there’s a world of difference between ill-considered illustrations in an 80-year-old book and the publicly funded tributes to treasonous racists dotting public squares that we’re only now beginning to rethink.  Both contribute to a culture of systemic racism that makes the deaths of people like George Floyd and Breonna Taylor possible.

The real issue, though, is that we cannot simply wash away our history. Indeed, denying it is famously said to ensure we will repeat it.  Our struggle against racism has not yet found the right balance between erasing our past and using it to illuminate a better, more progressive future.

Imagine a pre-school reading program that took “Mulberry Street” and other children’s books to trace the nation’s evolution on racial matters. That, it seems to me, would be a far better approach to making real progress than the Orwellian “it doesn’t exist, it never existed” decision of the Seuss estate.

Needs to be Rethought

Civics education has been sorely remiss in the US for decades. Only half of Americans can, for example, name all three branches of government! That is so basic a premise of our democracy that it speaks volumes about the depth and breadth of the problems we’re facing today.

There are excellent calls for revival—including an important initiative from Educating for American Democracy (EAD) offering a roadmap for effective civics education. Thank goodness.

There are limits on what average young minds can or want to absorb. The litany of names and dates that have constituted civics education for decades do little to help young learners understand the events and movements that have shaped our country, let alone instill in them a lifelong sense of civic responsibility. Therefore, offering too much, too soon – or simply more of the same — might just be counterproductive.

That said, if their curriculum starts in kindergarten, and they encounter fun, interesting human-size cases from history illuminating aspects of our democratic system, that might pique their interest and lead them to want more!

People, stories and ideas are what open a lot of minds.

Let us try giving them less BUT more interesting and exciting materiel.

For example—why are there 50 States? The answer, properly considered, entails another question: why aren’t there more or less? Working through that basic sort of issue starting with their daily lives might help start drawing them into the larger real world.

We too frequently start by having kids memorize lists of names, places and random facts.

If instead, we focused more on a few exciting people and events, the likelihood of capturing their interest and attention would rise sharply and carry kids deeper into subjects that could inspire their interests in knowing even more.  

Of course, we are all different BUT we all love a good story, and the American experience is full of stories that shaped the past and influence, even now, the challenges and opportunities before us.

If we could get kids’ curiosity aroused even before 2^nd grade, I believe the world ahead for that generation would be richly rewarded.

Is THAT what stands between us?

I am desperately searching for insights into how we came to where we are today with the country pretty much split down the middle.

The big question is not unity for its own sake, which by itself is not really a goal. Unity as an abstraction takes us nowhere because people rarely care about abstractions.

So, what does/will it take to get most of us back on perhaps a few pages we can all pretty much appreciate and reunite around?

When thinking about with the causes of our de-unification, we have run through a lot of empty ideas. Deplorables was one — though it was only an excuse. Education or lack thereof explains some others. Money and/or lack of it –perhaps. Interest in the greater world beyond one’s own street is important.

I hope you can see where I was headed, because I have begun to run out of realistic ideas that, even IF IMPORTANT, just might help explain the basic sources of our de-unification.

The time has come to look at TIME.

Past versus Future.

“The good old days” have always been quite appealing because memory has an amazing way of filtering out “the bad old days.”

The future, on the other hand, holds promises, which may be where disunification originates. My future is more important to ME than your future. Many people assume that if the other guy’s futures are going to be good, it must be at their own expense. So, they BOTH must promote themselves and put brakes on the other guy.

And, though we often forget, we are always living on the cutting edge of past vs. present.

If my analysis is anywhere near right, the combination of past vs. present and the differences we inevitably have as a diversified social system are what have made reunifying, just like in the good old days, so difficult.

Therefore, we need to weave the time perspective together with our inevitable differences to find new ways of coming back together as in THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA!