Letters to the Editor
-
the brain
You don't sound like a troubled opinionated know-it-all and I am thankful to you for illiciting such an inspiring response from Cary. I am also grateful to know that we have in our midst people who think about more than just their money and their lovers and their landscaping(or lack of). You do seem a little unbalanced in terms of your focus and interests though. Your letter makes it seem that you live above the neck and that's it. There is a brain that is alive without any body or heart...only a mind. I think it was in the French flick called City of Lost Children or a piece of sci-fi I just read.
So anyway,
Maybe you are looking from too far away or too high, and you need to scale your map down a bit, like when you are on a map program online... hit the (-) to bring it in closer so you can clearly see where you are. Start by actively working every day on one small thing that makes you feel a little better about this doomed world. This nagging feeling of disaster you have could save us, you never know.
I hate to admit that I too suffer from this stinking thinking that we are going to kill ourselves and this planet. It seems common, look at pop culture with all the end of the world movies and books. I don't need to be a brilliant scientist like you to notice that we are using fuel faster than we replenish or replace with something new and feel sick about the abuse of other species and ecosystems. History is something else you can study that proves our crooked but resilient past, filled with "sky is falling" scenarios and yet... here we are.
We are small, we can see a lot and improve a little. So get to work because you are correct, and we are in this sinking ship together. Be a soldier for humanity and the Earth, for your daughter. But first, take that vacation.
-
Some ideas
Some ideas for LW...
1) Rent this movie:
http://imdb.com/title/tt0117333/
Try to not scoff at it's message. There are lessons to be learned in the cheesiest of places.
2) Read "The Physics of Immortality" by Tipler, not for any spiritual insight, but as a primer on squeezing hope out of the most hopeless situations.
3) Try St John's Wort, some Omega3, and a bit of exercise. Semi-depression may be a realistic outlook, but consider it's limited utility. (Leads to emotional paralysis.) Often it's useful to have a working illusion. Learn to use a realistic outlook without letting it affect you emotionally. Looking down you do not see the possible ways out.
-
bad advice Cary
Cary, Can't help but think your advice is terrible in this case. I'm sure most people reading that letter would have the same response you did. But quite simply a vacation is not the solution. I am a university prof w/ multiple degrees from MIT. 90% of my engineering collegues and I agree with a portion of the basic thesis presented by One-Eyed Man.
The fact is climate change and peak-oil will have profound effects on humanity. Solar / biofuel / wind / even nuclear won't make any differnce in the equation in the next 10 years. If you look at the research in each of these areas, we are far from having any scalable solutions. With the economic growth in China and India, production of CO2 will increase significantly. We are (or perhaps were) in a position to change direction. When I talk to religeous people about these issues, they say "the end of times is coming and there isn't much we can do about it". Fact is, we can do something. It requires turning off a whole lot of stuff and living like it was 1820. But no one is going to do that until the effects of climate change become severe. By then it is too late.
Every previous war, disease, famine, will be dwarfed by the magnitude of this problem. Each of those previous events was local. Those events changed the lives of some (and sometimes even many), but never all the people on earth. And if you look at the world, it is incredibly unstable with multiple states possing the ability to destroy the entire world. Resource wars over food and clean water could easily spiral out of control.
Most people buy into what you said: "Where is your faith in science? Where is your wonder? Where is your readiness for the surprise of new knowledge?"
We don't need any of that... We need to give up our cars... turn off the lights... live in small apartments.. and have fewer kids. Sounds terrible... but so is the alternative. And we need this action on the government level because no one will give up all of this if their neighbor does not. Darn human nature.
-
Wow
Cary should visit his dad more often! Great answer.
-
Surrender.
I too have suspected that our country is headed for a terrible turn of events. Inflation, depression, recession, overpopulation, you name it. But I, unlike you, have faith.
The faith that I have is simply this: that not everything in the world can be explained by science, that most things in the human realm are relative, and that material mass of objects is equaled by the energy of living things, and that two are both inextricably linked, and yet not the same thing. Your daughters body is not her soul (and yes, I do believe there is such a thing as a soul) but they are attached for this brief period of time.
I do not think that a belief in the soul mandates a belief in Life After Death. I think instead of the soul as a bit piece of the universes hard-drive, a tiny micron of energy, onto which the lessons of this life are recorded as a progression of movements. When I am gone, my energy goes back into the universe, indented very slightly, by my time on earth.
We will all die, like all have died before us, and this is a good thing. Our lives will not look like the lives after us, just as they did not look like the lives before us. Your parents wondered about the world you would live in, just as you worry about your daughters world. It may not be a comfortable world that she inhabits, but comfort has always been wildly overrated. We live at the most "comfortable" time in history, and we have never been more widely depressed - mainly out of fear that this comfort will one day cease, as it should.
She will survive. Humans are plucky. And there are good people like you who think abut the planet, and long to do something to save it. The world can't be all bad if you're in it.