Apr 24, 2007

On Tolerance

If you grew up, live in and/or are connected to places where flora and fauna thrive, you will be more happy and tolerant than if you grew up playing video-games and, as adult, spent your time operating keys, switches, knobs and buttons.

This planet, Earth, is mostly biochemical, with a dash of gravity and magnetism thrown in for “seasoning”. Living creatures have to spend millions of years to evolve and adapt to it. Imposing faster, electromechanical rhythms on this planet stresses this complex web of mutually-supportive, variegated Life.

In turn, they begin to consume more than is good for them because they become insecure, aggressive, intolerant, competitive and destructive.

Species far more ignorant and indolent than us survive and thrive easily on Earth.

Not ignorance but an imbalanced activism, which even our simian cousins cannot match, is our problem…

“Teaching the Facts Of Life in a Changing World” to those BORN alive and kicking - is, if not phoney and foolish, but also facetious and false.

It is true, the land, air and oceans of Earth have been - courtesy of human hyperactivity - badly bruised; but its poles, axis, spin and orbit are as yet untampered.

We are threatened not so much by the multiplying poor - warmongers and the forces of Market Capitalism leave them little else to do, besides twiddle their toes - but by the misdirected electro-mechanical hyperactivity of (essentially greedy) intellectual and educated fools who, due mostly to self-generated stress, can seldom even claim to have clean bowels and bladders!

To make tolerance a key word - and a deed - in the 21st century, we must create and live with our children in an environment that is able to balance its biochemical* and its electromechanical constituents.

If, with our machines, we persist in our hostility to Earth, we will make it progressively less welcome and hospitable to our species; we could then either face slow or rapid obliteration, or, under a delusional sense of self-glory, try to run out into the irradiated blackness of Space, where, in its mind-boggling loneliness, some of us might try to create a world of our own smart folly.

Wouldn’t that be a little like Adam and Eve falling from Paradise all over again?
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*Includes biomechanicals - all mobile avian, marine and terrestrial life. All its motions arise from biochemical activity in its ‘musculature’.

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