Last Chance
Ezra woke up this morning with the following mantra playing in his head.
It's the last chance to speak your mind in 2004. The last chance to get it off your chest. The last chance to rant and rave this year. The last chance to get it all out in the open. The last chance you'll have in 2004 to show those assholes that you don't like how they're running the show. The last chance to let them know you don't even like the frigging show to begin with. It's a lemon. It's a loser. It doesn't work, hasn't worked in 400 years. Maybe longer. Maybe it never worked. Only on paper. On scraps of paper that got bound into books, that filled entire libraries, then reels of microfilm, then forests of hard drives. The collected drivel of the ages. Dead white men speaking to you from beyond the grave. Scrap it all. Put it out on the curb along with five weeks of funnies and all those mutilated copies of National Geographic. Get rid of Plato, Socrates, St. Augustine, Filo (Ezra threw him in to see if you were awake. He's really a baker in Jersey City), Seneca, Cicero, Rousseau, Locke, Hume, Hegel, Kant, Diderot, Voltaire, Nietzsche, Bertrand Russell, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Paine. And the list goes on. And on.
Hey, we're not talking about book burning. Burning would turn them all into martyrs, heroes of free speech, champions of the republic of ideas. Keep the books. Dump the frigging ideas. Start over. Stop going to school. Stop digging in the graveyard of the past for inspiration. Or, at least, stop looking for inspiration in sources wrapped in the Great Books of Western Wisdom Seal of Approval. Sure, you say. These guys - yeah, always white guys, have produced thoughts that have survived the test of time. Bullshit. They've survived because somebody was in the business of producing content for millions of dodo factories called schools. These dead white guys are the Brand Names. They were branded and, over the course of hundreds and hundreds of years, won a top shelf position in the supermarket of ideas. Think of Plato as the Nabisco, Aristotle as the General Motors of the knowledge industry. Hegel as Smuckers.
Consider this. Over 120,000 people died in the disaster that only a few days ago swept the Indian Ocean basin. Over a third of these victims were children who never had the advantage of going to school. Innocent children. That's a disaster of biblical proportions. That's approximate to depopulating Tompkins County, New York. Think about that. Walking from one end of Tompkins to the other without encountering a living soul. Now, an hour or so before the quake, indications started to come in to scientists around the world who were drinking coffee from cute Nietzsche or Aristotle mugs in their air conditioned labs. Maybe they were walking around, sporting teeshirts with that daffy grandaddy of science, Albert Einstein. You know the guy who tipped off Rooselvelt to the A bomb. So when the shock hit, What did they do? They started parousing the data, crunching the numbers. They picked up their cell phones and starting calling their buddies in the scinetific community. Or they opened their lap tops and started sending emails to the same buddies or else they opened logs and recorded the information for use in future research. Then the seismograph went off the hook. 9.0 on the so called Richter Scale. Richter was probably one of the grand old men of geology. It's not important to remember who he is because he got his name pasted to posterity. Now all these university trained scientists knew that tsunamis follow oceanic earthquakes. Yeah, we've all seen the computer simulations on tv. We all know what a tsunami is. The bozos sitting around at their seismic station in Hawaii knew what a tsunami was. What did they do? What did they do to warn folks who lived in coastal areas around the Indian Ocean? Folks in Sri Lanka, India, Thailand? Folks who had time to evacuate their villages, the resorts, the coastal cities?
Nothing. No one was warned. No one who had a chance to survive survived. The scientists sipped coffee, checked out their machines, crunched the numbers and did nothing.
In the bible, that savage, seemingly heartless, aloof, curmudgeonly dude named Jehovah or Yahweh would occasionally destroy a city, send a pillar of fire, or a flood or whatever as a warning. He would slay the wicked, sometimes even the innocent but unfortunately guilty by association, to make his point.
Well, maybe this our last chance to get the point. Civilization as it's been run so far by white men with college degrees hasn't advanced us to the point where we can even call ourselves mensch.
Comments invited at: ezrakidder@gmail.com - Peace, Ezra at 6:35 AM
