Global Health Solutions

On Being Alone

We can never know what it is like to be someone else. Our consciousness, no matter how vast, never can leave our mind. Our understanding can be enhanced by compassion, empathy, and sympathy, but attempt as we may, we can never be someone or something else, at least not while we remain alive. What happens when we die? I hope death is like permanent general anesthetic, a complete loss of consciousness, an end of all being, either that or assimilation into an Over Soul which contains all the souls from all the ages. The former is a complete loss of consciousness; the latter is an inundation into pure consciousness.

I’m tired of being isolated, of being cut off from others, limited by speech and writing. What primitive means of communication humans employ, unable to convey meaning without it being obscured. The mere translation of thought into speech corrupts the thought, and all that hear it can never know its true form. There is no word with a universal meaning. Everyone has their own definitions invested into words. One word spoken to one thousand people conjures up a thousand images, no two identical. This is the nature of man and language.
It seems like it should be simple to share pure thoughts with another person, but it can never happen. At best a general idea can be transmitted as a rough approximation of the thought being conveyed. At worst the converse of the thought is understood and neither party knows it. Proximity of the parties, one would think, would enable clear communication, but alas no matter how close they come the minds are separated by layers of skin and bone. Never can one mind enter another to glean the true meaning of its thoughts.

It is easy for a machine to sync its driving and driven members, simple for a computer to transfer bit for bit to its brethren all information in code. But the moment it enters our eyes or ears it is dashed upon our brains, the ship of language washes up in pieces on the distant shores of our understandings, never making it to a safe harbor intact. The billions of people on this planet create conflict and war because no one truly understands each other. We create bureaucracies to approach common goals, but these systems serve as much to frustrate us as they facilitate our ends. To strike a chord that would induce harmony in all humanity would be an achievement deserving a million Nobel Peace Prizes.

What would this metaphorical chord consist of? It would be a package containing the most profound thoughts of Jesus, Buddha, Gandhi, etc. delivered straight to the brain, unpacked by whatever cortex they were native to. To some extent we all have these thoughts. "I like to be treated well, so Ill treat others well and maybe they will reciprocate my kindness." "We are all going to die at some point, so what is the purpose of accumulating and being attached to things." "We are all basically the same on the inside regardless of ethnicity, so let us tear down the racist institutions, and battle peacefully for truth and justice." The problem is that we have these thoughts independently of one another, and our excitement from them cannot be shared perfectly with others. Humans are such self centered creatures that any excitement we attempt to share usually turns into mock excitement expressed by the recipient. Only by revelation through common experience can excitement be shared equally. Even then each individual makes what they want of the revelation, and its meaning is never universal.

What are we to do about this problem of perpetual miscommunication? How do we assemble a package of catholic meaning to bring all of humanity together? What vessel will deliver it? And by what method can it be administered without corruption by preconception or misconception? Soon we must figure this out or we will be made extinct by our own hands.

Some Requirements for Prolonging Humanities Survival

The Earth is a spaceship. In order to better cope with this reality humanity must assume certain responsibilities, and accomplish a number of goals. The more able (the super rich) should assume their proportion of the burden. Call this process compulsory evolution. Humans must no longer defecate in their purified drinking water. They must no longer waste material, and count on the destruction of natural disasters, and wars to stimulate the economy. We must cease all needless consumption of natural resources, and all the behaviors that will lead to humanities downfall.

The world energy budget must balance. Humans presently consume energy faster than it is renewed. Oil consumption alone outstrips the pace at witch energy from the sun is bound up by plants, which is how oil, coal, and all fossil fuels are created in the first place. This must stop, it is dangerous and stupid. Even though we as individuals are not always affected by our behavior and the choices we make, people someday, our children their children and so on, will be affected by this period of reckless consumption and waste, and curse us for bearing them into a hateful, spent, and polluted world. This is called trans-generational tyranny. I already see it in my generation, land prices skyrocketing, inflation, cost of living, and poverty, are all increasing. We will see it more and more, health care, insurance, everything will cost more and more until we can no longer afford even simple necessities.

We are entering a time of diminishing returns. We are no longer able to discover vast new frontiers literally or figuratively. What we must now concentrate on are the less profitable internal issues of refining every day life, fine tuning society and civilization to operate within tolerance of its environment, its container if you will. In the end these things are what will matter. Humans can live comfortably without Moon expeditions and Mars rovers; they have for thousands of years. In this day and age pushing the envelope yields less and less returns in valuable information, knowledge, or production.

Now is the time for focusing inward, thought and action must be applied to simple everyday problems like food, water, and shelter, streamlining transportation and communication. Banking and investment must have its attention focused on its long range future, only then will its selfish shortsighted practices of convention, and the status quo be reformed to encompass the World’s long term health, and security.

Progress must cease to be a cliché. Politics must promote evolution, evolution not revolution. A world cultures teacher once taught me that a revolution holds by definition a 360 degree rotation and a return to the point at which it started. I would agree that most revolutions historically had that result. What can one expect when calling it a revolution? We must progress beyond new beginnings; stop wiping the board clean, and rewriting history only to repeat it. It is time to evolve culturally, consciously. A little cultural evolution would go so far today, with so many opposing forces and conflicting interests, nothing seems to change. Certainly nothing much gets done without something to counter it.

The "free market" is only intelligent enough not to loose tremendous amounts of money and profits over a short period. But over the long haul with its sights set on nothing but one hundred percent ownership it will fail. In a system where only a few benefit from the misfortune the masses, it is only a matter of time before the pendulum swings in the other direction, and the masses rise up, hungry for justice.

How We Will Influence Our World When We Are The Ones In Power?

If we were to experience a disaster on the scale of what Katrina induced now here in the northwest and especially Lane County, we would handle it well. We have a tremendous public transportation system. The bus drivers do a phenomenal job. We could evacuate everyone quickly and start immediately in the event of an emergency. There would not be such mayhem as there was in New Orleans. It is true the logistics of an evacuation from New Orleans are much different than from Eugene: terrain, population, and demographics.

The white able population was out of New Orleans before the storm’s threat was imminent. But a large population of those who could not afford to leave was stranded in the heart of the city. There was not a soul that wished to remain in that city with fetid sewage, dead bodies, gasoline, oil, and a myriad of other chemicals, along with millions of tons of floating garbage. The city instantly became a superfund site. It became a hundred superfund sites. It was a human catastrophe, and because of that it is cold to speak of the environmental and economic damages immediately. But we must address and deal with the problems confronting us. No one imagined the devastation of the storm compounded with the levee’s failure, at least not the general population. There was neither a pre-planned evacuation procedure nor an action plan to quickly repair the levee in the event of its failure. As a whole the country did not believe that such a disaster was possible. Thus it was a great blow to the country in a symbolic way. It proved that there is no guarantee from the central government that we are protected from this type of phenomena. It also demonstrated that the federal government is ill prepared to cope with similar catastrophes when they occur elsewhere.

Natural disaster coupled with large urban areas and aging infrastructure is a recipe for compound catastrophes. A large amount of our infrastructure was built during the Great Depression to stimulate the economy by giving people jobs. Consequently much of it is nearing the end of its intended design life. If necessary renovations are not performed, along with in some cases complete replacement of infrastructure, our bridges, dams, levees, reservoirs, highways, and railways will become vulnerable to disasters, and even begin to fail under normal conditions.

Europe seems like it is heading in the right direction. A rapidly growing portion of their energy is produced by renewable sources. Energy laws mandate the integration of solar power into newly constructed buildings in many countries. Wind generation is exploited wherever feasible. Their public transportation runs like clockwork. In Sweden the trains literally arrive and depart on the second of their schedules. In Western Europe the train system is completely electric, and in many places integrated seamlessly into city transit infrastructure. Healthcare is available to everyone. Post-secondary education is free to those who wish to pursue it. Their social programs are generous in comparison to ours.

This generation wants to preserve our humanity. We are crying, screaming out: there is something terribly wrong with the activity of our nation. And it is all connected, inseparable manifestations of toxic chemistry, stress, corporate brainwashing via commercialized media, all of it, they can keep it. I don’t want your Las Vegas. I don’t want your fumes. My generation did not ask for these things they were forced upon us by the previous generations.

Attempt to ascertain the effects of the oil industry. Fully consider the consequences of driving. It is sick: the Exxon Valdez, war, smog, acid rain, cancer. Our way of life is killing us, it is killing the Earth. Our reckless consumption creates markets that purvey death, destruction, and injustice in their search for more resources and cheep labor. Humanity is just beginning to see the results of our behavior. More frequent and more intense hurricanes, changes in atmospheric gas concentrations, the melting of glaciers and what once were permanent ice caps, rising sea levels, vast dead zones in the oceans, the defilement of lakes, rivers, and once pristine estuaries, the loss of wetlands, desertification, species extinction at one thousand times the natural rate, all of these things are direct results of human activity.

What will our generation do about the damage humans have wrought upon the Earth? Will we leave it to the next generation, as the previous generations did to us? If we are brave enough, we will own up to the previous generation’s failures, and begin to affect positive change upon the World.