A New Planet

A New Planet

"This is a major milestone on the road to finding Earth's twin," said Douglas Hudgins, Kepler program scientist at NASA Headquarters in Washington. "Kepler's results continue to demonstrate the importance of NASA's science missions, which aim to answer some of the biggest questions about our place in the universe."   Michelle Johnson, NASA Ames Research Center

Last night I had a dream, a crazy dream filled with images.  I have these often.  It was a restless night for me.  In my sleep, I was driving up over a hill on the highway and traffic was backed up for miles.  As we slowly motored up the hill towards a police officer waving people through, there were multiple tow trucks pulling wrecked cars out from a ditch below the hill; there were body bags strewn about.  When we pulled up next to the police officer, they stopped traffic to allow one of the trucks to pull out.  The cars were smashed, some rusted, and we asked the police officer what happened.  He said, nobody knew.  The cars appeared to have wrecked at different times and nobody ever found them.  We pulled over, as I am sure any police officer would let you, and we got out to walk around.  It was a war zone feeling.  How could so many cars have wrecked and nobody said anything?  It wasn’t a steep ravine; it wasn’t covered in trees, or hidden by rocks.  It wasn’t on some windy country road; it was in town.  We looked up from the ravine and there was a faded dark blue apartment building with wood siding towering above the wreck site.  One window in particular had a shrinky-dink rainbow hanging in it with slightly open blinds.  We asked the officer how come nobody up there noticed or called, and he simply replied, “we don’t know.”

            The dream gets weirder as I begin to wonder around the area dumbfounded by a feeling of apathy in the world.  I see a grandiose dying tree, reminds me of the Jardine Juniper in Logan, off to the side with high brown grass growing around it.  As I walk towards the tree, I see a giant albino boa constrictor sliding up the gray and dead branches.  When it sees me, it quickly moves in.  I can feel the snake wrap around me and at first I try not to fight too hard and calmly peal it away from me.  The tail begins to wrap around my legs and I finally call out for help.  I begin to struggle, to reach up and grab at the head, to try and unwind from it.  The skin is cold.  I reach into the mouth of the snake and ram my hand deep down into the mouth.  The grass is high and I can feel as I slip away, covered in shadows, and nobody is looking or seems to care.

           

Recently, I was in an argument with a person over creationism and teaching it as a science in the classroom.  It was a roundabout argument with no clear way to get off.  I didn’t know the person; they were a friend of a friend of a friend.  She kept telling me that evolution had been proven by science to not be true and that the liberal science community had brainwashed everyone into believing their history.  She said creationism had been proven to be truer by using “real” science.  I was dumbfounded by this statement.  She gave me a website with “science” articles where I could find the “truth.”  Not being one to exactly walk away from an argument even when all common sense says this won’t go anywhere, I dove into the website and started to read.   

            In their world, the earth is only 6000 years old, dinosaurs were around with humans (it is still debatable whether or not they were on Noah’s ark, and oil (or any “fossil” fuel) can be created and replenished quickly.  The bible is absolute truth.  It is deductive reasoning.  If the bible is true, then all else must be true also.  He is the son of God, or the whole thing is a sham.  The earth was made, with everything on it, in six days, and then God rested.  He kicked up his feet, flowing grey beard cascading into clouds, and sat back to watch.  But why?  I know the stories and rationale behind free will and faith…the party in the sky.

Walking to Albertson’s to rent a movie, Chico runs ahead and I know it is dangerous, but I trained him.  It is my responsibility and anyone who knows me, knows I take care of my dog.  In Berkeley last week, I was visiting friends.  Chico wanted out from the apartment and so I opened the door and kicked him out and said, “good luck, you’re on your own” and shut the door.  It wasn’t a minute later this lady knocks on the door with a look of horror on her face asking if someone just told that dog “good luck, you’re on your own” and kicked it out of the house.  She was practically breathless, aghast that anyone would kick such a “cute” dog out alone.  I jumped to try and explain he was my baby and he is. 

Chico runs ahead of me to the first cross walk on the corner of El Camino Real and Brisco.  He knows he can’t cross the road without me.  He is not allowed off the sidewalk unless I go with him.  He stops at the fake grass on the corner, doesn’t bother peeing, and waits for me.  I arrive, hit the cross walk button and wait.  Cars race up and down.  Chico looks at me for the signal and I watch the light.  After tiring of waiting for a while, he takes a seat and looks up at me for direction.  Ours is the last of the cycle and I tell him to stay with me.  He knows the command, but doesn’t always obey.  We cross Brisco, push the button and wait again for the light.  Once again, we are almost the last cycle.  The lights are not timed for pedestrians; they are made to make traffic flow as quickly as possible through a tight constriction under the freeway.  As chaotic as it might feel, there is a science to the madness.  It might need to be re-evaluated.  It is a terrible intersection and perhaps the worse in the entire Five-Cities area.  We walk under the freeway, cross two more lights, and then are free to walk up the hill towards Albertson’s.

I like science.  I don’t know if I always have, but I do now.   I have been doing it for a while.  I am not good, but I am learning.  My dissertation might not be revolutionary, but I enjoyed the process.  It is a process of discovery.  I don’t know how to do the cluster analysis by hand, but I understand the basic math behind it.  Nonetheless, I hear Dr. Berry reminding me that the stats or only as good as the story we tell with them.  It must still make sense.  Words are important in the interpretation process.  Science is a methodology in my mind.  Some have argued it is a paradigm; however, I feel, and perhaps Kuhn would agree, that science is not a paradigm, but a tool for changing them.

A friend and mentor in writing once turned me on to Chet Raymo’s The Soul of the Night.  In it, he describes redshifts, a Doppler effect when the light wavelengths stretch out as the universe expands.  Quasar (Quasi-stellar radio source) are the brightest of the redshifts.  They are said to be an accretion of matter, or a collection around a super massive black hole at the center of distant galaxies.  They are billions of light years away, and therefore, billions of years old.  They are light from the beginning of time.

Corporations do what they are supposed to do, the same way scientists do what they try to do, and pastors at churches do what they need to do.  And politicians, I’d say in essence, but definitely not in practice, they do what is best in the interest of the greatest good.  They are there to protect us from the powers of money, science, religion, and each other.  Still, our government is founded on the idea that all those things can exist; they are driving agents for the evolution of culture.  They inform every part.  Right now, over 40-50% of Americans believe in creationism.  99% of all scientists, and 70 Nobel Laureates, don’t believe it should be taught as a science in schools.  From 1990 to 2005, the average CEO salary rose almost 300%.  The average worker rose less than 5%.  Corporate profits were up over 100%.  In one workday, out of 260 possible, a CEO would make more money than the person working in their factory floors did all year.  Congressmen/women make almost four times the average worker.  Our government is not working for us.

From an NPR article preparing for President Obama to give a speech in the exact area Teddy Roosevelt did a hundred year earlier.  These are the words of Roosevelt:

We grudge no man a fortune which represents his own power and sagacity, when exercised with entire regard to the welfare of his fellows. Again, comrades over there, take the lesson from your own experience. Not only did you not grudge, but you gloried in the promotion of the great generals who gained their promotion by leading their army to victory. So it is with us. We grudge no man a fortune in civil life if it is honorably obtained and well used. It is not even enough that it should have been gained without doing damage to the community. We should permit it to be gained only so long as the gaining represents benefit to the community.

We do not understand our community.  I am not a person to run away from a fight; I fled once as a kid, running from my friend at the time who was mad at me for god knows what reasons; I think it had more to do with things in his own family; He tried to apologize many years later and I shrugged him off when maybe I shouldn’t have.  He was a dick, but I could have been nicer.  I ran from his desire to fight.  It made no sense to me.  When I once put myself in between five guys to help one guy, I paid the price for it.  My Kung Fu instructor told me I didn’t know for what I was really fighting.  I should have thrown a stick at them, called them names, and ran away just far enough to have them chase.  Certainly I could have eluded 5, high-on-something, kids, and get them to chase for long enough that the other person could get away.  Sometimes the best option is to run away; however, when the next place to run is 600 light years away, maybe it is time to fight.  I do have real fear, but I am not afraid.

Chico prances along the sidewalk towards the redbox to rent Conan the Barbarian, the remake.  I know it won’t be good, but that doesn’t matter.  I think that is why they made the movie.  They knew some of us would watch it regardless of how bad we knew it would be.  Conan fought against “evil.”  They killed his family and his entire village, and he seeks revenge.  Next to the redbox, a couple in love stands.  They whisper close to each other and smile.  He has on the red apron and shakes the bell for The Salvation Army; she is close by and seems happy.  Does the bliss come only from the love of each other?  Is their army mounting an offensive I don’t know about?  I like the look of love they give to each other and out to the world.

I can interpret the snake many ways.  Some might say it is the devil, he comes to me and shows how he has me wrapped up, and I don’t want them to know.  The true talent of the devil is to make others think he doesn’t exist.  I am fooled my science and doomed to hell.

When you invent something, be ready for it to become bigger and better than you.  Isn’t that part of the desire behind invention?  Isn’t that the beauty of the human mind, of thought out of nothing, understanding from the dark?  Invention is the mother of necessity.

We ate from the tree of knowledge; we took from God the very thing that makes us human.  With knowledge came love.  In exchange for perfection, we choose knowledge.  Some have theorized that the other tree in the garden was that of ever-lasting life.  I believe we chose knowledge over eternity, and that has made all the difference.  With death, comes love and life.  With pain, comes necessity for invention.  Each step of the way we learn something, figure it out, and work towards getting back to God, to perfection.  It is a route we take as a civilization, as an earth, and we do it together.  I do hope that even when the sun threatens to destroy the earth, we will survive.  As a father or mother, your greatest desire is to have your kids be better than you, to do more than you.  Without critical thinking and the scientific method, we would still be in the trees.  As we build high rise building and retreat to our apartments, are we moving backwards?

Chico and I walk back to our warehouse.  Cars whiz by us everywhere.  I can smell the carbon and feel the heat coming off the engines.  In front of Trader Joes, nobody stops to let us walk by.  We wait as three, and then four cars ignore us, their places to be more important than ours.  They need to get there quicker.  Finally, a car stops and they wave to me.  They are friends and I wave back.  It feels great to see people you know while walking.  We head down the hill and back to the crazy intersection of lights.  I hate it.  The sidewalk is only on one side of the bridge and while we walk, oncoming traffic rushes by trying to make the next light as quickly as they can.  I would never want to bring my kids through this.  Why is everyone in such a hurry?  Are they really saving time, and if so, for what?

            Why can’t we listen to the science?  We scour the universe for other earth-like places where we might retreat.  Why such apathy towards what happens here, right now?  We dream about the possible oceans on other planets, while polluting our own.  I bought a waffle iron from The Salvation Army, and when I went to buy a scrub brush to wash it, I couldn’t find a single brush not made in China at any of the stores to which I walked.  I went to lunch with a local store owner the other day and he spoke about the disparity of wealth between his salary and his workers, about the stuff from China, and about the future of the earth when people don’t listen to science.  I am not upset at him.  In fact, I have always said I think a legitimate argument is one that admits this.  I am OK with someone telling me they think things are getting bad and they are going to get what they can while they can—survival of the fittest.  How could I disagree?  I disagree with apathy not reality.  I prefer we choose differently.  Why not deregulate it all, cut them all down?  Why dream of distant earths where my distant bloodline might one day walk and live?  Because today I walked on the beach at low tide, dead birds in the littoral, bits of plastic scattered in the seaweed, and a beautiful woman walking next to me.  In those few glances into her eyes, I could feel the black holes of the world accreting around me, the universe, billions of years old, light from the age of dawn, expanding, redshifts in my blood, and I just wanted to kiss her and hold on as we spin out of control.

Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving

Tonight, we sit satiated by food and listen to the kids’ laughter as they dance about in the room.  One of my nieces already has on a princess dress when I arrive, later in the night I see another change into a terrible idea for a dance costume, and I really see how much they dream up life and it makes me think about drama class in summer camp where everyone dug through the chests of old costumes to be something else for a little while.  I have always been a person in love with imagination.

*

One week earlier…

Today I head over to speak with my Kung Fu teacher.  He is an important person in my life.  He has called me and told me he has a brain tumor.

I am walking around Chico, the leaves are turning.  The pepper trees and sugar maples are filled with anthocyanin and the carotenoid from the black walnut and sycamore ignite the streets with color.  The crape myrtles have already dropped their leaves.  This is the season for senescence.  My home town doesn’t have the fall colors the same way.  The seasons are more subtle.  They are always there.

Ah, to be in love again, not with a person, but with the world.  Love senesces and buds again.  Everywhere I look I see with eyes of a lover, the newness, the amazement, the fascination of a world in harmony and balance.

*

I am thankful for the laughter of my nieces and nephews, my family and friends.  I walk with my Aunt Martha, my father’s sister along with my mother out from her sub-division that used to be English walnut orchards over to a new sub-division waiting to be built where the last of the walnut orchard once stood.  They are gone now, a few here and there on the lots all numbered and for sale.  It is great to see my Aunt Martha.  She is a unique person in my life.  In a time when I needed to escape, she took me in barely knowing me and I moved to Alaska to work at her fishing lodge.  In Karluk, the tiny native fishing village where I flew in to meet my Aunt, I found bears, salmon, friends, and a part of myself.

*

Anh, my Kung Fu instructor, is from Vietnam.  His instructor was from China.  She fled during Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution to setup a temple in Vietnam where Anh found her.  He lived in the temple for almost 15 years learning the entire Shaolin form of Wing Chun from her.  He says he was allowed to leave only if he promised to teach.  He has tried.  None of us have been good students.  When I left, I told people Anh wanted a disciple and I could never be that person.  Many people tried at different times, only to fail.  When he called me on the phone last week and told me the diagnosis, I knew I had to go see him again.  It is daunting to go see your Sifu after so many years away.  When I left Kung Fu, Anh pulled me aside and told me I was doing too many things; he said, “you are doing 5% of 20 things.  You need to do 20% of 5 things.  You need to quit some things to be better at the others.”  I walked away from Kung Fu.

*

My Aunt Martha left for Alaska in the 60’s.  It was a Wild West Alaska filled with drugs, booze, and fish.  When her southern born husband found a fishing lodge to buy, they jumped on it and started a remote life with the bears on the Karluk River.  Someday, I keep prodding her, we will tell her story.  She is dying and I admire the courage at which she too tackles death.  I picture death as a fly-fisherman fighting from shore.  She is in the deep the current and running back to sea.  She turns her head to look, tries to shake the hook loose, goes back down, and runs down river more.  I can hear the reel scream as the line goes out.  She is the Chinook we dream about, running from the river back to the sea where death stands on the bank and fights as the Shelikof sits at his feet.  He reels us all in eventually, some never fight.

*

When I walk up to Anh’s house, the gate is closed and I call him on his phone.  He comes out to let me in.  He looks the same only a bit more tired.  He calls to me, “Net.”  I have always liked the way he tries to say my name.  I think of fishing nets.  I think of the sets I would make with Cecil and Dale on the Karluk River.   As we would pull the net to the shore, the silver flashes of fish would bubble and churn in the water.  We would scour the net for the biggest to pose with for pictures.  We would pull the fish from the nets and toss them into a boat where they would gasp and shutter into death.  I would push it out of my mind.  This is the paradox of life.  We can’t live it without death.  Anh was caught up in the Vietnam War, and as a POW he lived off of bugs while in prison.  He never spoke much about it.  Today, he talked about death.  He said he wasn’t scared.  Many times he has been close to death.  We talk about yin and yang.

*

We walk the dogs over to the old stacked stone house on the edge of the Arroyo Grande Creek.  Where it once stood surrounded by stately walnut trees and rich top soil, there remain square lots.  It is ugly with wrought iron around the watershed.  And when I think about the houses that will be crammed into the area, I get more disgusted.  We grow and grow and grow, and think it can go on forever.  There is no balance.  My Aunt Martha asks about places.  She is disorientated.   She lived her as a kid, but so much has changed it is hard to imagine the same place now.  She talks about fields she once rode her horse through.  They are mostly gone now, gone to fences and subdivisions.

*

Anh gets tired and weak. He tells me he has to lie down.  He is treating the tumor with herbs from his knowledge of Chinese medicine he learned while living in the temple.  He tells me, so far, he has had some limited success.  The growth of the tumor has stopped, and he started a medicine program to shrink the tumor now.  Last MRI showed a slight reduction, but he knows it might turn at any second.  He tells me he has had a good life and he doesn’t fear death.  I try to tell him how much his teaching has meant to me over the years.  He haunts my dreams the way so many people do whom I love.  They come to me when I most need them.  They are always there pushing me to do more, to be better, and to live the life I can imagine.

*

When we return from the walk, my mother brings out my grandmother’s varsity letter.  My grandfather sent it to my mom recently.  We all marvel at the giant “P.”  On it are metal medallions, one for class president, one for valedictorian, one for volleyball, one for cheerleading, one for editor of the school newspaper, and one we don’t know.  My love of learning comes from my grandmother.  She was the jack-of-all-trades I aim to be too.  My mother tells the story of how my great-grandfather bought his first car, not even knowing how to drive, and loaded up 7 people and everything they owned in the car and headed to California in hopes for work.  When the work would run thin, they would all drive back out to Missouri.  My grandmother moved a lot, but those final two years of high school they stayed in one place, and look at what she accomplished.  Sure, there were only 20 or so people in her graduating class.  We joke that she cheered for her own volleyball game.

*

I hug Anh when I leave.  I don’t’ believe I ever even tried that before.  You don’t hug your Kung Fu Master, but I did anyways.  He walked me and Chico out to the gate and I waved goodbye.  I believe I will still see him again, or I hope so.  As the gate shuts, Chico and I walk around the neighborhood.  It is the same neighborhood I have spent much time around: the old Diamond Matchstick Factory.  We stroll back to my friend’s house, past houses I lived in, houses I loved in, and we stare at the changing and falling leaves.

*

As Thanksgiving winds down, the music my step-dad makes stops and the kids go from dancing to putting on pajamas.  While some plan out strategies for shopping, I plan to leave to go out to a friend’s ranch for the weekend.  I have tried to avoid the holidays for the past few years.  Not because of family, I have tried to spend it with family or friends each year, but I want nothing to do with the buying of crap.  Last year, I bought only one Xmas gift for one person.  This year, I will try to make them all.  After everyone leaves, I sit with my Mom for a while.  We don’t talk much.  She has done so much to try and keep our family together and I love her for that.    For now, I can feel the dormancy in my own body.  I can feel the senescence that slows us all down a bit, but also the energy of spring building.  Chico and I eventually get up to leave.  We head back over to our little warehouse.  I start to go inside, but stop.  We decide to go for a walk.  We walk around the cemetery.  I strangely talk to the dead and the living inside of me the same way.  I hold them inside of me as part of the past even as that moment falls away, it buds anew inside of me.  I carry it around.  I think sometimes the lines between death and life blur; the yin and yang contain each other and swirl.  I hear my mother, my Aunt, my Dad, Anh, my family, my friends, all of them talking to me inside of me.  I think I only exist as parts of them.  My grandmother has a grave marker in the cemetery, but I whisper to her inside of me.  I try to imagine how it would have been to have her there today and how much she would have loved to watch the little girls dance around the house.  I try to tell her thanks.  I hope I convey my thanks to all of you.

The Needle and the Camel

 I am writing again.  I currently live in a giant metal warehouse.  I don’t have a yard, no garden, no neighbors.  I walk around an industrial part of town with Chico, my Portuguese water dog for those who don’t know, at night and listen to the sound of cars whizzing by on the 101 freeway.  It is strange to think how much things change in a short amount of time.  I am working on the dissertation and I have a big trip planned, but I can’t be silent.  I tried to turn it all off and focus inward.  After so many months consumed by my own heart, I am out and watching a world fall apart in some ways, but also be built up in ways that lift my heart.

                I support the Occupy Wall Street Movement.  It is pretty easy to support them, but the more I find myself in arguments and debates over what it means and how it works, the more I realize I can’t ignore it either.  I am a creature of Thoreau.  There are four men, from about the same time period, who influence me every day.  I try to simplify my life because of Thoreau.  He reminds me that non-violent civil disobedience is more than a right, it is stronger than any gun we could wave.  Whitman reminds me to love.  He rips open my minuscule ideas of compassion, splays open my heart to a world sometimes so ready to stomp it down, all you can do is hope.  Twain reminds me that as cruel as the world might be, we must find laughter in the ways we fight it.  And lastly, perhaps most importantly, I hear the quiet and subtle voice of Lincoln making decisions and acting in ways in which you know has serious repercussions, but it is ethically and morally right.  In Lincoln’s haunting face I see the hard decision of thousands of battlefield deaths and yet sometimes a decision has to be made.  Somebody has to rise up and finally say, “this isn’t right; things should be better.”

                This morning, I rolled up the large metal door to the early morning sun cresting the Coast Range Mountains.  As the door squeaked and cried awake, I looked out into the industrial lots and asphalt; non-native ice plant creeps along the hillside used for erosion control, non-native pampas grass reaches panicle flowers up into the new sun, waving in the delicate morning ocean breeze, and wind-blown seeds glimmer against another day.  Soon, the monarch butterflies will return in droves to the coast.  Where the cypress trees once wintered the vitis-like lianas of orange and black butterflies, bunches of drooping wings now dangle from non-native Eucalyptus trees.  The smell of Eucalyptus is engrained into my childhood as if the trees were always meant to be here.  In my lifetime, wine grapes have taken over the hillsides where cattle roamed before them, dry bean farming before them, and sage seeds and oak acorn before them.

                And when the so-called native people arrived 5000 years ago, the landscape was different.  When the mountains that migrated here on the Pacific Plate emerged from the ocean and created the land, everything was salt water.  And perhaps it wasn’t until the same land washed out to see and long shore currents carried sand south closing the gap between South and North America, creating the Panamas isthmus, that real migration took hold—the great exchange between what we now call South and North America.  The isthmus closed off ocean currents and created the current jet stream, pushed the ice age back up to the poles, opened land bridges, warmed the new land for seeds carried by tides and birds and the wind.  Change is forever and constant.  The very land we stand on is moving north.  The recent earthquakes are reminders that everything west of the San Andreas Fault is land of the ocean.  And one day, if our beautiful sun permits the earth the time, this land will cross out to sea up near San Francisco, and possibly submerge back down into the blue depths.  Nothing stays the same; nothing is permanent.

                And yet the idea of stasis, the abstract thought of forever, is an idea conceived in the minds of a species alive and able to think about these topics for a fraction of a second.  Nothing is forever, not love, not the human race, not land, and not even the boulders strewn about the hillside.  Adaptation and evolution is the key to survival.  As land moves, so must we.

                As the earth’s population crosses the 7 billion mark today, we have to learn to realize that nothing remains the same.  There is no great golden age of politics, no perfect time of the past.  I don’t believe in a Garden of Eden.  What was is a story we tell, a lesson we learn to help maximize reproductive fitness now.  The earth wasn’t created for us, we were created for it.  We are part of a long line of evolutionary history stemming out from the stars.  And when I look out into the winter constellations of Orion rising to the east at night, I wonder why?  Is there an end goal?  What is the next step of evolution that carries us out into the Universe?  Are we nothing but a pale blue rock floating in a dark abyss one day silenced by supernova?  Perhaps that is too big to even think about.  I don’t know where we are going or why.  I do know that arguably few other species on this earth form the type of relations we do with other people.  And some learn to love the plants, the animals, the landscapes of the world around us because our survival is not solitary, not species specific, but interdependent.  And yet, we fight wars, mostly over resources such as oil and water, but often over stories of supernatural people with powers to walk on water and convert wine to blood, people who can speak directly to a being we can’t see or completely fathom but hope exists because the abyss is too daunting and scary to face.

                And here I am, alone in a metal warehouse in an industrial part of my hometown.  But, I’m not really alone.  I have friends, family, and even you—the people I love.  I would do almost anything for any one of you.  Would I kill for you?  That is the real question on my mind.  Should I ever be asked to do such things for love?  What would I give up in order to make sure not a single one you have to die?  My own life?

                Jesus is a figure in some people’s lives and in the stories they tell not because of some link to the supernatural or the hereafter.  He simply said, kill me, and let them go.  I don’t really know what he was blamed for, or why he needed to die.  I do believe he sacrificed to save other people’s lives.  Lots of people have done such things in history; they are martyrs and heroines.  Now, I don’t know all the motives of the people currently “occupying” different towns and places across the world, but I do know that the same mentality is there.  People involved in non-violent protest put their lives in jeopardy because they care about the world and the people in it.  They say things could, and should, be better.  I don’t know how anyone can say, I deserve more than you.  I do understand giving and saying, here, you need this more than I do.  Have we come so far in this history of earth to finally kill each other over big houses, big cars, big TV’s, and big egos?

                It is time to turn to science, to learn to use science.  It is not religion, but an orderly system of looking at the world around us and trying to make the best decisions possible.  With 7 billion of us, there are a few things I think, as intelligent people, we should be able to figure out.  Every single person should have healthy food.  We do know what a healthy diet looks like; we know how to grow foods that are healthy and sustainable.  Nobody should ever knowingly die from dehydration.  When there are massive droughts in part of the world, we can figure out how to bring water to every single person.  Where there is water, it should be as clean as we possibly figure out how to make it.  We are made of water. When we make a mistake and pollute the water, we do everything in our means to repair it.  I don’t care who it is, what their religion is, the color of their skin, or the amount of money in their wallet, when someone is sick, they should get medical attention to the best of the world’s ability.  Nobody’s life is more important than another. Nobody should get rich off of sick people.  We should use the minds and the resources of 7 billion people to heal and cure.

                Lastly, we must educate.  Everyone needs to understand how to use science, not as a belief, but as a method of observing the world, collecting information, and making informed decisions.  We must teach how the earth sustains life (ecologic literacy), and then how to come together to communicate, debate, and decide on actions.  We debate, not to win the debate, but to make the best decision possible.  Debate is not about the debater winning or beating the other person.  It is not a sports game where the outcome of one side beating the other side amounts to nothing but bruised egos.  We are talking about policy and decision making.  As groups, we listen to the debate and then continue the conversation amongst ourselves deciding why one seems more appropriate than the other, and often we compromise.  When things are inconclusive, we conduct more research and use science to try and help us make that informed decisions more informed.  Most of our efforts towards making decisions are to make sure we don’t hurt the food supply, the water source, or the health and well-being of any human.  We can no longer afford to agree to disagree.  People are rich, in our current view of wealth, only if there are things for them to buy.  Money is a social contract.  As a people, we make money have value.

                Thoreau reminds me that I don’t need much to live—good food, good water.  Whitman reminds me that the only real reason to live is to love.  “I give you my love, more precious than money, I give you myself.”  As Mark Twain once said, “The human race has one really effective weapon, and that is laughter.”  Lincoln once said, at the beginning to the Civil War, in his first message to Congress, when not a single slave state voted for him, “This is essentially a People's contest. On the side of the Union, it is a struggle for maintaining in the world, that form, and substance of government, whose leading object is, to elevate the condition of men -- to lift artificial weights from all shoulders -- to clear the paths of laudable pursuit for all -- to afford all, an unfettered start, and a fair chance, in the race of life.”

                We are here, in the middle of trying to change something.  People are rising up to the streets and demanding for change.  The lists of demands are fairly clear regardless of how some media try to portray them.  As Thoreau once said, “To speak practically and as a citizen, unlike those who call themselves no-government men, I ask for, not at once no government, but at once a better government. Let every man make known what kind of government would command his respect, and that will be one step toward obtaining it.”

                It is evening now.  The fog is rolling in as I go to roll the door shut.  I can see the fingers of fog as they creep through the valleys, the ocean reaching up onto land.  I can feel the cold moisture in the air.  As the fog hits the warm metal building, the water molecules condense and I can hear the way the ocean drips off the roof splashing onto asphalt.  The asphalt is slowly eroding away.  I can see where the water runs and will keep running.  It takes time.