2006
Another new year firmly mired in the mud of all the previous years. Everyone else is busy recapitulating the high and low points of crapulous and debauched 2005 - if in fact, they’re not busy rewriting it to suit their political purposes. The future may be beyond our control, but you can make the past be what you want it to be. Who wants to look ahead?
What do we have to look forward to in 2006? We entered this new century and this new millennium with far less optimism, it seems, than we embarked with at the beginning of the 20th century when science and the unraveling old social order was promising us a brilliant future. Perhaps we’ve become a backward looking people, grasping at a past both real and imagined and afraid of the destruction the religiously ill have been wailing about for thousands of years. Even 20th Century Fox has decided against upgrading its name; preferring, as Foxy things do, to tailor the old century to fit its purposes.
The imperialism, laissez faire capitalism and massive injustices of previous centuries seem to be more appealing to our leaders and their followers than the less authoritarian and more egalitarian society I grew up envisioning for the future. Progress has become a word to be scorned.
But of course progress is there to be found if you have a good enough microscope. The State of Florida now has a law designed to prevent road-hogs hanging out in the left lane at 80MPH and thus inconveniencing the luxo-truck drivers. The State of Illinois (or L-Annoy as many inhabitants call it) after so many years of being run by scaly creatures, now has an official State Reptile - the Tiger Salamander. Wisconsin will now extend pre-natal care and delivery services to illegal aliens while Virginia has decided to deny it. New York cut taxes for those making more that $150,000 a year and Missouri, at long last, moved to require homeowners associations to delete restrictive covenants that discriminate by race or religion.
So actually there is progress being made, it’s just a question of whether it’s forward or backward or going around in circles.
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7 comments:
The only thing we know for sure that will get better in 2006 are video games. The rests is going down the crapper.
Are you saying that there is an absolute truth in history? Like, the conspiracy to keep minorities from voting in Florida. You mentioned circles; did you realize we all travelled about 600 million miles last year and came back to the same approximate place (neglecting the expansion of the universe)? With 6 billion passengers, that's a lot of man-miles. All without purpose. You can check-out www.deathclock.com to find when you check-out. Beware, if you are a pessimist, you may already be dead.
Only the religious talk about absolute truth - that leaves me out. The abuse of the Florida Felons List however, isn't a matter of opinion.
You're neglecting the velocity of the Sun and the rotation of the galaxy, along with it's trajectory toward the Andromeda galaxy. . . pretty complicated, but we never come back to the same place, even if you ignore the time dimension.
Now if you subscribe to the Roach Motel hypothesis, few of us ever actually check out, but of course that is a matter of opinion.
That the universe exists seems to be an absolute truth, I won't be so presumptuous as to ascribe you believe that, but if you did, I don't think it is religious or philosophical. I would agree with you that it is a shame to pick and choose in the application of law for the convenience of political purposes. It is interesting to think about the fact that we can never go back to the same place. I think it is an absolute truth that with the passing of a fragment of a moment nothing is the same.
oh, i forgot, I wanted to ask you if you though a person who believed in some sort of spiritual realm is necessarily religious? And do you believe it is possible that there may be some kind of spiritual realm? I mean spirits not emotions, beings independent from matter except for the e=mcsq relationship?
Seems to be is the operative term. We can only work with what we can detect. The undetectable must remain a conjecture. If all truth is based on an axiom or assumption, it cannot be absolute. There are only high and low degrees of uncertainty.
Spirits are a religious concept by most people's definition of religion, but of course all such discussions depend on the definitions and there are too many to deal with here. Energy is not organized and can't be sentient and besides, and as you say, energy and particles are ways of looking at the same thing. Whst kind of realm is in no place and contains things that are undetectable? It's religion.
Absolute truth is a religious concept as well, because it deals with something that can't be achieved but only approached.
Thanks for your thoughts and perspective. I was thinking of "absolute truth" in a more literal sense. Definitional, both ab truth and spirits/religion. I was thinking that to know is is wrong to unjustifiably hurt another is an absolute truth quite separate from religion, but I suppose it may be only learned. It seems instinctial to me, like it is encoded in my genetics. Ultimately, everything necessarily is derived from nothing.
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