Posted by
Sue on Sunday, November 25, 2007 1:48:51 PM
11/25/2007 9:26am PST
It is scary. I truly begin to worry about the future my grandchildren and great grandchildren will inherit. Maybe I read too many different kinds of things. The brain has been and is one of my most favored subjects. I have tried to read as much a I could about the progress being made in the brain. No so much how we think, as to why we think as we do. Science is getting particularly scary. While you and I discuss the price of stuff, buy and sell stuff, live our lives and look forward, too many of us have no idea just what the "scientists" are discovering, nor, how those who wish to dictate to us how to live will use the new information coming from every place on the planet.
When I was much younger, I had that naive belief that humankind would overcome the obstacles inherent in just being alive. That what ever good was being discovered would help everyone, everywhere, equally. That, is not, however, how it happens. For a very long time I couldn't understand why it happened that way. Today, of course, I do. It is not economic but a political reality. Not all humankind will get the help and attention it needs, no matter who says differently. No matter what the demands may be. And even when, as our "artists" have discovered, something is attempted, it usually doesn't get too far without the corruption of the locals. Ask Madonna and Angelina!
Stalin certainly didn't care about humankind. Millions on millions of his own people were killed and others as well because he could, in spite of his personal political world view do as he wished and there was no one to stop him anywhere on the planet....like, Mao, Pol Pot, Idi Amin Dada and so many others around the globe. No matter what you and I think, feel or want, these types of evil don't care. And, no makes them have to care. We, the Western world, has attributed to these maniacs and those that have have followed in their footsteps for decades, the equality of law and diplomacy. As if they care
But, is that any different that what we have done in our countries? In Europe, the remnants of their past continue to plague. For the Europeans, diplomacy is the only way to secure your own while holding off the inevitable. They have finally begun to see, perhaps too late, what Islamofascists actually are and want. What they need to understand is that their leaders of all sides gave these folk a legitimacy necessary for their success not to mention that they sowed the seeds of their own destruction.
In America, we have done much the same with the gangs that now plague every sector of society, one way or another from poor to rich. We did not deal with the problem and therefore, gave them a legitimacy necessary to prosper. They themselves never did anything but take care of their business as they saw fit regardless of what "normal" society wanted. Today, we continue to pay for that blindness(?) and lack of will. Who profitted from the decades of mayhem and murder as they grew into drug cartels all over America? Corruption permeates every level of society. Nothing is immune....hmmmmm.
But, the scientists continue to delve deeper and deeper into what makes us "human"...the why and how of it. Someday, they will be able, in vitro, to clean up the personality to a great degree. But, they will never be able to penetrate the soul of us. Perhaps that is where the hope lies, our soul. Let's hope so.