Recently in the small town of Bluffdale, Utah residents were shocked to see high foaming green toxic slime rising out of the storm sewers. Rather than being the plot of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles pilot episode, this actually happened and many people got sick. The source was traced to Utah Lake via the Jordan River (the lake’s only outlet) and the Welby Jacob Canal.
The lake was already known to be over saturated with a particularly nasty type of green algae and the authorities had already treated it with chemicals to eradicate this growth. Farmers were told not to use their irrigation water from this source and people in general were told not to worry. The medium risk numbers for the particular cyanobacteria involved, are stated as 100K and the latest measured levels were 700K.
The chemicals used to treat the lake water produce a foaming action and cause the algae cells to release their toxins as they die off. Although the lake was contaminated with a type of algae that can cause Lou Gehrig's disease, the act of killing the algae released the toxins that were bound up in the algae. The lake was shut down for all recreational use and local people were told not to worry about their drinking water. Lake Okeechobee and the St. Lucie River in Florida and Georgica Lake in The Hamptons are other bodies of water suffering from this same plague.
I was once told by an Australian Naturopath, that when the body has an internal malady the last place it manifests is on the surface of the skin. This can occur when the problem has already been conquered within. The paradox is, that when the real threat exists, we may be largely unaware, due to lack of visual evidence. Usually, we become concerned when we discern visual signs that something is amiss. Many times, this can be nothing more than the smoke from a rifle after the bullet has long since run its course.
Some of the greatest historians have brought to our attention, that as civilizations are born, grow and dissolve, the period that we later mark as being their time of greatest expansion, is actually the period after the centre had already begun to die.
When I think of my grandparents, who were born just at the turn of the twentieth century and compare their experience of culture and civilization to my own, half a century later; I am struck by several interesting things. For example, my grandmother lived through the use of a horse and buggy for transport and had to transition to a Dodge Dart. Similarly, she experienced reading by sunlight, candle light, gas light, electric bulb and was still alive when nuclear produced electricity came into play. My grandfather witnessed the ancient ritual of writing letters become the mindless dialing of telephones. Both experienced cooking in iron stoves with wood fuel and the transition to natural gas.
They witnessed the telling of stories at night become listening to Elvis on the radio, Bob Wills on the phonograph and watching Gunsmoke on TV. Clothes that had been washed in the creek wound up in a washing machine. My grandfather, a sailor, began his career on sail powered vessels and lived through the transition to steam power and later to diesel-electric power. My grandmother's food, which once came from her father’s six hundred acres of East Texas bottom land, transitioned into trips to the Piggly Wiggly Supermarket. They saw the Colt 45 pistol become the atomic bomb.
Some of those changes were definite improvements both in quality and in kind. Some were not. This type of progress makes for interesting cultural accounting and each generation can draw up different lists. Rather than argue the merits of these type of changes, as is so very tempting to do; I would rather direct your attention to a comparison with a similar list of changes drawn from my life, that is, from the period of the mid 1950's to present.
I was born into a world that already contained the radical new inventions of my grandparent’s world. I was also witness to some changes in my own time. I remember when Bakelite and other plastics made their debut in the kitchen. From the Spindletop Oil Gusher in my grandparent's time to the DuPont Corporation in my own time; plastics derived from petroleum began to replace what had once been made of wood, ceramic, leather, metal and glass. I saw automobiles, furniture, building materials for human dwellings and clothing slowly become plastic. Long before I knew about BPA, I strongly disliked plastics. They did not smell right to me or to my dogs.
I watched Wars of combatants in distinct uniforms fighting for publicly stated goals morph into Police Actions and Conflicts, conducted by Peace Keepers for officially vague altruistic reasons. Although I am from a generation born to atomic weaponry delivered by rockets and have watched laser, electromagnetic, sonic, chemical, biological, economic, and psychological weapons being developed; their impact in my time pales before that of the advent of the cataphract in more ancient times.
At this point, I will take the metaphorical laces representing the changes experienced by my grandparents and myself and tie up my dancing shoes. In my estimation, the quality of the changes were greater in my grandparent’s time than in my own life to date. Having said that, I could easily go farther back in time and find that earlier changes were yet greater in magnitude than those in my grandparent's lives. Once upon a time, the wheel was a big deal. Fire making was a big deal.
Contrarily, fixing an atomic bomb to a rocket changes its versatility as a tool of idiot diplomacy but it remains an atomic bomb. An armoured horse is a hefty upgrade, yet it remains a horse. An electric powered, self driving automobile is still an automobile.
The rotary-dialed, wall-mounted telephone has, in my lifetime, transitioned to a keypad, desktop unit, which became a cordless unit on a receiver/charger base and eventually shrunk into a small, portable wafer-like device with internet capabilities. These smart phones merely combined the existing media technologies of TV, radio, telephone, telegraph, camera, etc. A debit card is a digital variant of an older fiat currency economic system. Fatally flawed from birth to be killed by its own expansion and eaten by its owner.
If you dismantle the assemblage of a Swiss Army knife, the individual tools remain what they were long before the folding knife was invented. My point is, that in my lifetime, many things have been combined, refined or improved. I hold this to be quite less impressive or life changing than many of the truly inventive breakthroughs of the past. The transition to human flight is more impressive to me than the transition from Kitty Hawk to a Stealth Bomber. The epic, life changing inventions that remain accessible to non-billionaires have already been put into play. Currently, we are merely being amused by constant re-branding, re-combining and re-purposing. In this way society is tweaked, coerced, managed, massaged and nudged.
If you dismantle historical events, the individual tools (or fools) remain what they were long before deals were struck and plans were hatched. As when a French King offered the Viking Rollo, a big chunk of real estate in return for mercenary services. He didn't do it out of altruism towards his Scandinavian neighbours, he did it to expand and consolidate his own meagre holdings. His only condition (re-branding) was that the warriors profess to be Christians. Subsequently, those guys raided all the way from Jerusalem to Sicily and Calabria. And when Pope Gregory II called on those Normans for help, they burned a quarter of Rome.
El Cid was of Muslim, North African lineage according to one of his relatives in possession of private family archives dating back a thousand years or so. People still join a festival in Spain every year honouring him as a White Christian Hero. Richard the Lionhearted couldn't speak English, wasn't born in England and didn't reside in England, yet he was the quintessential English Hero King.
I think that one problem with our species is a lack of discernment in knowing when our important needs have already been met and we need no longer to strive and connive for more. In our world, being satisfied is looked upon by many as being backwards, lazy or worse. Yet it is this same dissatisfaction that drives great people to their demise and ordinary people to chemical escape. Water, food, shelter, clothing and companionship, remain as our unchanging necessities and are unappreciated by most of those who possess them.
In my humble opinion, a few, a very few, old Japanese and Chinese men figured this out. The fact that they had to live in caves on top of mountains, write poems on mossy walls and get drunk every day on dandelion wine should give us all a clue as to what we are up against. The universe is expanding and there is no doubt about that fact. We are creatures cringing at flashes of lightning and sounds of thunder. The paradox is, that if we are alive to witness these visual and aural signs, it means that we have miraculously escaped the actual lightning bolts.
The sturm und drang that we witness on the nightly news needs be put in this same perspective. The Big Bang has already happened and you who read these words began to die before leaving the bed of your birth. The glaciers started to melt before they ceased expanding. The people who we see as the dominant minority in all periods of human civilization, have already shot their dice, spun their roulette wheels, placed their chips and drawn their cards. They have always been knights of arrogance presiding over squires of ignorance.
As the lakes in Utah, Florida and New York mentioned at the beginning of this essay illustrate, the pedigreed, perennial twits and their courtiers have again peed their beds, soiled their khakis and run their ships aground. Putting out a double album now, only serves to prove that the band ran out of real material two releases ago. It recently occurred to me that we do not fear that which we respect.
The essence of the political turmoil which we see and hear of today, has already bolted and gone to seed like neglected lettuce in the back corner of the garden. Your folks came through their trials and so will you. I would add that if you can hold the image in your mind of our universe rapidly expanding into the infinite and see our planet as a speck in that dust cloud; you would logically come to the following two conclusions. One: We might as well be kind to each other during the ride. Two: It is patently ridiculous to take abuse from any human.
fin