Day 4

Being retired is more of a challenge than I thought. Many more questions surface when one doesn't have WORK as a convenient excuse for scheduling most of one's waking hours. And as if my own mind is not enough of an ugly taskmaster, my iPod just went to Bob Dylan singing 'A Hard Rains A-gonna Fall'. This is where we were in the early 60's - and through most of the 50's - fearing day to day that nuclear annihilation was just a moment away. This, more than anything else, paved the way for the radicalism of the 60's and 70's - faced with immanent destruction the nine to five corporate life seemed like a hypocritical cop-out. But the whole sex, drugs, and rocknroll thing frightened the natives so along came Reagan and it was 'Morning in America' and everything was stood on its head with country music stars wearing long hair and beards and the aging hippies discovering how to make fortunes selling software, real estate, and designer drugs.When I was in college everyone wanted to be in the Peace Corps or join a commune. By the time my kids graduated from high school everyone wanted to be an Investment Banker or an attorney. No problem was so serious that it couldn't be solved with enough money and PR.

What is really strange is that now the real threats we face - from Global Warming to Energy and Water shortages - are equally as serious as nuclear war but largely outside the control of single states (or even groups of states). Yet people seem to be largely indifferent even though these problems are potentially lethal for all living things. I fear that by the time circumstances really get their attention it will be too late. I probably won't live to see it but for those who do it looks like the current crop of 'gathering threats' will be the biggest crisis humanity ever faced (see James Howard Kunstler's _The Long Emergency_). And we are singularly ill equipped to deal with anything of this magnitude that is so outside our experience and learned behavior.

And since this train of thought was really getting me down, I took the Metro downtown to catch a matinee of "In the Loop" at the E Street Cinema. This is a British political comedy and is very like a Tourettes Syndrome version of The West Wing as imagined by Robin Williams in his best cocaine days. Just what I needed. I liked it a lot.

Now back at the apartment doing necessary chores - laundry and such. Not as much fun but necessary. The real world is always there. But that's the thing - the "Real World" we talk about is just the up close world - the one we see every minute of every day. But that world is constructed for each of us by our limited senses situated in a particular culture at a particular time and place. We know what we know by virtue of our limitations. Outside of that tiny sphere there is an unimaginable world of variation over time and space that we are not privy to. From the earliest earthly fossil three and a half billion years old to the farthest galaxy - a billion stars a billion light years away - we are such a miniscule flash in the pan that our pretenstions to centrality and importance are laughable.