God plays dice

     A friend of mine died this week.  He wasn't a close friend, but I knew him for 32 years and I wish we were closer.  He was a pretty incredible person and it would have been nice to know him better.  Besides being incredibly talented he was just a really nice person.  My first memory of him was when my son was joining his little league baseball team right after we moved to Florida.  He had no friends and Mark introduced him to his son, another incredibly nice and talented person.  The two of them took my son under their wing and he was immediately incorporated into their community.  For all the great talents he had, I am most enamored by his generosity of spirit.  I think your children are a reflection of what kind of person you are and he has four wonderful children who are medals on his wall of achievement.
     At the funeral his dearest friend and constant companion Jack, gave a moving and inspirational eulogy for Mark.  He noted how everyone's first thought when describing him was "renaissance man".  It's true.  He was a scientist, a writer, a musician and on and on.  He went on to recite two quotations from one of Mark's books, "God doesn't play dice with the lives of men," (Albert Einstein) and "I am what I am," (Popeye the sailor man.)
     But sitting in church and reflecting on life I had to disagree with Mark (and Al Einstein.)  God does play dice with the lives of men and with every molecule and muon in the universe.  People were looking for a reason at that funeral...a reason Mark had died two weeks shy of his 65th birthday...a reason why they wouldn't.  I looked at the stained glass windows around me depicting Christ's stations of the cross, and realized that all religion exists because people want to believe that God doesn't play dice.  But what's so wrong with believing there is no reason, that it is all just chance?  Jack related that Mark's son picked up his car from the hospital after he died and drove it back to his home.  As he parked the car he noted the odometer said 100,000 miles...exactly.  And Jack said...'there are no coincidences.'  But there are... precisely because we don't notice the hundred thousand times the odometer was off.  So what?  So what if there is no greater reason to live than to live the life Mark did, to create and to procreate.  I may disagree with Mark about God and dice, but I definitely think Popeye got it right.  We are what we are and whether we choose to make the most of it or to believe there is some higher reason, some greater reward is a very profound choice.
     It is the very reason for what I think ails our society...our world.  When mankind was young and knew nothing about the world it lived in, it is understandable that they invented gods and myths to explain it all.  And when science emerged about 500 BC and we began to learn, it is also understandable that those gods were rejected as useless crutches.  It is not surprising when mankind began to unravel the mysteries of the universe but was still fearful of death that one myth prevailed, the dream of eternal life.  But that fear and that dream have resulted in terrible things.  That fear has resulted in the dark ages, in crusades and war, in killing, in persecution, in bigotry, in hatred, in all the things religion claims to disclaim. 
    As I sat in that church I admitted (for the zillionth time) that I am frightened too, and I am jealous of those who put their faith in a higher being and feel so comforted.  But so what?  I am what I am and isn't it better to face that fear than to hide from it?  Wouldn't the world be so much better if we weren't trying to tell each other how to live, what to believe and trying to build bigger and better bombs to kill each other?  The bible did get it right.  We just don't listen.  Now that mankind has unlocked the keys of the universe it is time we let go of the myth of fear.  "When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put childish ways behind me."
    Mark had it right.  He was what he was.  I don't think it's so bad to live every day as if there were no tomorrow, every moment as if it were your 100,000th.  Goodbye my friend.  Even though I hardly knew you, I will miss you.

Words matter

This past week Osama bin Laden was killed.  He was a symbol for an enemy unlike any we've ever known in the United States of America, unlike any we've ever known in the so-called "civilized world."  Death in war is a frightening concept, but when it's played "according to the rules" we can somehow depersonalize it, imagine that it only happens to soldiers, those people we don't know (unless we do,) people who signed up for the killing, knew what they were getting into, even got paid for it.  But the death of "innocent civilians" is an atrocity we can't comprehend.  Or maybe we can, if we call it "collateral damage."  Words matter, and even the few I've written will incense victims of 911, a symbol for that different enemy, the "terrorist" who kills even "civilians."  He is the inhuman monster that does not care who he murders, whether they are "soldiers" or babies.  I do not mean to say anything that would make the deaths of those 2752 civilians any less tragic or meaningful.  I am horrified by the killing of innocent men, women and children, as I am horrified by the holocaust, as I am horrified by the genocide in Rowanda...as I am horrified by Dresden, and Hiroshima and the deaths of 109,990 innocent Iraqis.  The United States of America responded to Osama bin Laden by lashing out.  We were enraged by this enemy we could not see, who wore no uniform, who did not play according to Queensberry rules.  So we invaded the country where he was, and for good measure, the country where he wasn't.  We kicked him out and we killed the dictator in Iraq, and by the way we only lost 109,990 people to collateral damage in Iraq and about 10,000 (give or take a few people) in Afghanistan.  But we won.  We killed Osama bin Laden.
What bothers me so much, is not that we as a country are so happy he's dead.  Surely, had I been of age,  I would have celebrated the assassination of Adolf Hitler or Joseph Stalin.  And I think it is justified to murder bin Laden, even according to Queensberry rules.  But it's the words we use that bother me.  He was our enemy, a man who felt we were collateral damage.  The civilians of the United States were his Hiroshima and Nagisaki.  All I am asking is that we recognize it as such.  We can celebrate the winning of a battle as long as we understand the cost of the fight.  It demeans our humanity...it demeans humanity...to think we are no less guilty of murder for killing one man, than we are for killing thousands or millions.
Martin Luther King said "Returning hate, multiplies hate, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars.  Darkness cannot drive out darkness:  only light can do that.  Hate cannot drive out hate:  only love can do that."
So the country is celebrating.  People are out in the street shouting hurrays.  College students who were babies in 2011 are cheering and partying in revelry over the killing of Osama bin Laden.  Our president, who is hated by almost half the country because their names sound alike, is taking credit for, and making political hay out of the United States of America murdering one kidney-failing terrorist.  I have yet to hear one journalist, including those from the far left, finding fault with this.  It appears to be the only issue that brings our country together, and maybe that was its purpose, not only its unintended result.
But words matter.  Let's face it.  Might makes right and history is written by the victors.  There is no text on the founding of America written by an Apache or a Navaho.  There is no one in New Mexico who thinks they are living in occupied territory.  And so if we want to preserve our way of life, we need to fight, and unfortunately slay our enemy.  But we do not need to demean what that does to us as a country and as individuals.  We pay a price for that murder, each and every one of us.  It would be humane to acknowledge that.  Words matter.  

Rambling prose: Children as art

Rambling prose: Children as art

Children as art

My father turned 100 today.  I miss him though I'm not sure he knows it.  I took him for granted when he was alive and I'm sorry about that.  Towards the end of his life I began to question mine, and, I think inevitably, my mother and he took the blame for what I didn't like.  During that period they were kind and generous enough (I hope it wasn't naivety) to gather up and give me all our correspondence that they had collected from when I went to summer camps.  It was damning!  When I complained that my camp councilor was bullying me, my mother told me my father had worked himself to the bone so I could enjoy a summer in the sun, and that if I didn't have anything nice to report, to make it up!  I've told that story a hundred times to show how insensitive they were, but the truth is that sometimes I feel the same way about my own children.  I seem so spoiled and so ungrateful for what I've had, so I'd like to take this opportunity to apologize to my parents.  They weren't all that bad.  In fact, they were pretty darn good!  They fed me and housed me and loved me.  That's all we can or should expect...the rest is up to us.
But there is an art to rearing children, one that is undervalued and to my mind, poorly understood.  When my children were young my parents told me that parenting was a matter of good instincts and that I didn't have them...that if I gave them my son and two daughters for just two years they could really do something with them.  My wife had convinced me several years earlier that we should take parenting lessons, and after harumphing for an appropriated time I finally consented.  We studied the theories of Haim Ginott and I was a thorough convert.  I read all his books and more.  I was completely convinced that we needed to learn how to be good parents, that it didn't just come naturally, and that my mother and father were a perfect example of that.
Now my children are grown, (and quite successful, thank you very much.)  Today my father would have turned 100 and I'm not as sure as I was when he was alive and here to criticize.  He certainly didn't do what Haim Ginott would have done, but today his three sons spent an hour on the phone together reminiscing.  My father was an accountant but he really wanted to be a teacher.  We hated him for trying to teach us and refused to listen, but in the end we really did.  And though we've spent the better part of our adult lives trying to figure out how he screwed us up so badly, we're really not that bad.  We all have good lives with our first wives and with good children and grandchildren who all love each other.  So it's not about instinct or knowledge, it's about love and respect.  My father was a good man who loved and respected us and that's the art of being a good parent.
Happy birthday Dad.     

Valentine Poem to Marlene

Februaries ride in on winter storms that chill my soul

They dull me with the dreary sense of never ending cold

It is a time when I can feel alone and over-suffer ills

When life seems burdened with remedies and pills

But there is beauty in the harshness of February snowing

The joy that comes each year; that comes with knowing

There is someone here sharing frigid days and rainy nights

Who softens burdens making darkness fill with lights

That there is someone here who knows my ways

Who’s lived with me through seasons filled with Mays

When life and love abound in all the blooming flowers

When it is clear to see what gifts and joys are ours

It makes me look again at sheets of February ice

Beneath the drifts and flows that others find so nice

To see that dormant times may not portend an end

But rather be the start of some exciting trend

So let us take a trip of dreams into the months of spring

Where trees will bud and birds will sing

When life will blossom with the mien of something new

When all that’s good is there because of you

Rambling prose: Can Facebook save us?

Rambling prose: Can Facebook save us?

Can Facebook save us?

We, as a people, have deceived ourselves.  We’re convinced that because we can send men into outer space, tame rivers, build skyscrapers, split the atom, talk with each other from thousands of miles away through a gadget smaller than our hand and even watch television on it, that we have evolved beyond 'Homo erectus.'  I’m of the opinion that we have devolved into a viral plague, and like a virus we invade our host and destroy it from within.  I am a true believer in science.  I have always believed that it represents the highest and purest manifestation of the one characteristic that sets us apart from all other life as we know it, sentience.  Self awareness, that state of being that allows 'Homo sapiens' to look into the heavens and understand that it is not eternity, not God, but only our imperfect perception of the laws of physics.  It is also what allows me to look into myself and write this essay.  But I am beginning to see science as no different from religion, just tools of this virus, not much different from the protein and nucleic acids of all viruses.   They fool the superorganism, this world we live in, into thinking we are just one of its own cells.  But when we gain entry they take over the host’s own machinery to make more virus, eventually destroying it from within.  Religion and science are our tools of viral insinuation, replication and destruction.

I don’t know when it began, how this 'Homo virus' evolved from 'Homo sapiens.'  We were always a violent species.  It is possible the fault, if there is such a concept in evolution, lies in our limbic system, that ancient part of our brain which controls our emotions and our survival mechanisms.  Konrad Lorenz said it 50 years ago:

"All the advantages that man has gained from his ever-deepening understanding
of the natural world that surrounds him, his technological, chemical and medical
progress, all of which should seem to alleviate human suffering... tends instead

to favor humanity's destruction"  

We are lions in sheep’s clothing.  Our bodies, designed like those of peaceful herbivores, have no fangs like the sabretooth tigers, no speed like the cheetah, or stealth like the cobra.  From the neck down, we are lumbering sloths and should have become extinct long before now.  Something in our limbic system got programmed to make us hunters and a hunter with no weapon is sure to be killed.  That could have been the end of this story right there.  Evolution has made many wrong turns but we rarely learn the results because there are none.  A limbic system designed for a lion in the body of a lamb.  What a joke.  But in one evolutionary ‘Hail Mary’, we survived.  We learned to use tools.  That moment, for surely it was a moment, maybe no different from a child taking its first step, but one that had not been taken by the species for thousands of years until then, saved us.  That one defining moment is most wonderfully captured by Stanly Kubrik in the movie “2001: A space odyssey.”  In this scene a group of apes are vying for access to a small watering hole.  They behave like any group of apes behave when trying to be aggressive.  They make threatening sounds and hand gestures.  But that’s all they can do until one group gets tired or intimidated and leaves.  That is, until one ape picks up the leg bone of a dead animal and slaps it into his hand.  In that moment he understands that he is not limited to grunts and gestures.  That that bone can break other bones, smash heads and kill animals.  The leap may have taken thousands of years, with baby steps along the way.  But slowly, our ancestors learned they could survive with tools and weapons.  The evolutionary step that prevented our extinction became the means of our own future destruction, and unfortunately that of many more living beings besides ourselves.

But though our limbus may have made us hunters, it is religion and science that are our weapons.  Hunters are biologically programmed to kill prey but not themselves.  Predatory behavior towards other species is crucial to survival but intraspecies combativeness rarely leads to death.  There is a switch, especially in animals equipped to kill easily, that stops the aggressor from delivering the ‘coup de grace’.  Bared teeth around a jugular vein signal the end of the fight, establishing a winner and a loser left alive to fight another day. (Don't get me started on animals bred specifically to kill each other for sport by their human trainers.)  But that impulse for self preservation is less ingrained in more peaceful species, those animals not dependent on killing for their food.  And so it is that humans have less inhibitions toward killing each other than any predatory animal should.  That is where religion and science take over.  With our teeth around the jugular vein of our enemy, religion fools our brain into thinking different people with different beliefs are really different species.  But it is science that gives us the tools to accomplish mass murder, extinctions of entire species of beings and eventually ourselves.

The process that has led us here to this time and this place, possibly the ultimate time and place, has been in the works for thousands of years.  It may be our privilege and our curse that we get to say we were the last of our species.  But whether it is now, next year, next generation or ten generations from then, we are sliding inevitably towards the abyss.  Our cerebral cortex, that wonder of evolutionary adaptation, that mutation which serendipitously saved our skin, has taken over and will be our deathnell in the end. 

If there is a positive note in all this it may come from our cerebral cortex.  I used to believe humans could work out any problem with technology.  If we could send a man to the moon or increase food production by a factor of a thousand, then with enough cooperation we could repair the ozone hole or solve the energy problem.  But our limbus keeps getting in the way.  Agression trumps innovation.  Thus my cynicism.

Now my hope.  Stuart Kauffman has proposed a theory of life.  In short he suggested that there is a realm in any complex system between order and chaos.  Start with a few light bulbs and connect two of them with wire.  Repeat the process and eventually you will end up connecting three and then these will connect with three more and so on.  Eventually the result is a vast network of randomly connected light bulbs.  Turn on the juice and some interesting things can happen.  With no regulation on how the juice flows there is just chaos.  With too many rules there is just repetitive blinking.  But tweak the system just a little, put in some loose controls and gradually, in some bizarre way, we begin to see order emerge just at the edge of chaos.  This may be how life began on earth, how the cerebral cortex developed sentience and how we may dig ourselves out of the mess we have wrought.

Facebook has created a network with over 500,000,000 nodes, each humming along with its own random input.  Maybe, just maybe, as long as we leave it alone, there will someday occur a unifying factor,  an organizing rule, say a movement to foster peace, or to save the environment, or to feed the hungry.  It might not take too much to make this superorganism develop a superconsciousness just at the edge of chaos that will keep us from sliding down the slippery slope to an otherwise inevitable puddle of ‘gray goo.’