A little Mid-April Essay:
Corruption is a disease of the social animal. Like most diseases it can start as an innocent little sniffle, some local cop accepts some bribe for special treatment of some merchant, a DOT engineer moves a highway interchange in order for a powerful politician landowner to sell some worthless land for a premium. School boards decide to insert personal, religious and political agendas into the teaching curriculum. Slowly things go badly. Raise your hands if you: drive the speed limit on the freeways… come to a full stop at stop signs… never drive after drinking… Chances are only one or two managed to get a hand up because we are a nation of law breakers and hypocrites and we relish the lies, the destruction, the greed and the cheating, oh how we love to cheat others. In the process we have cheated ourselves out of the opportunity to establish (for instance) a democracy, a well educated advanced society, a world where income will not determine if you survive a deadly disease. But we won’t because so many of us have bought into the lie that money makes you happy and only losers play by the rules. Look at our popular entertainment, the movies, the television shows and write down the qualities of the protagonists in the stories. Go back a few years: “Dirty Harry” is a cop who cheerfully tortures and murders suspects. “Batman” is a simple vigilante who considers himself above the law. Hell, Superman is an illegal alien! How many movies have as a plot the stealing from or murder of others justified because the criminal is presented as funny, smart and reasonable? In point of fact most criminals are failures who can find no way to live except as parasites on the rest of us, not unlike all professional politicians. We are attracted to the inverse concept: bad guys who have a heart of gold, stupid people who are truly wise, poor folk who manage to be generous and helpful. But in reality we are a pack of dogs fighting over scraps tossed out by the wealthy who own the government while laundering their ill-gotten money by having ever increasingly expensive “elections”, carefully gerrymandered to make sure the Right people always get into office. The idea of a People rising up against their Masters to make a new egalitarian life has never happened. We’ve just traded Masters. Just like there has never been a large scale democracy there has never been a large scale communist society. Instead we advertise the former and deliver some form of autocracy, usually excused as being needed temporarily, maybe 5 years, until the people are ready and then making sure nobody is ever “ready” by sabotaging the educational and information systems to promote political agendas rather than the greater good. For those of you who think the so-called “Democrats” are different I suggest you consider how easy it is to join, leave and rejoin the Party, and how votes are carefully crafted to give the appearance of debate when we all know one man has the power to decide which laws get passed and it ain’t the President. They cooperate while dissing the Bad Guys in interviews, they party together, do drugs together, share underage sex partners together… what makes anybody think professional liars are going to give a rats behind what happens to the People? Corruption is taking down the Russians, but look with open eyes on the Western Powers… The United States is no longer “united” and elections are no longer “free and fair”, so how is it we are a democracy? Did we vote on this? Not according to the numbers. As we leaned on the USSR for decades we grew like two trees intertwined. Now the Soviets are crumbling under their own hubris and ya know what? The “United” States is not long behind in splitting up. Not many empires last more than a couple of hundred years and our is no exception. If the diseases we ignore don’t get us and the Earth doesn’t scrape us all off through climate change chances are we still are in the process of regrouping into a smaller, hopefully saner body of humanity. By smaller I mean a few hundred thousand individuals. That number can be handled by our planet. As far the idea of billionaires colonizing Mars? Gravity. Mars has very little gravity which means none of our biology will work over time. Our bones shrink, our blood doesn’t flow properly and our muscles fade away. In orbit we can see this every time one astronaut stays a year or so in space, they begin to fail because our bodies are designed for 1 G, not 1/3 G. The animals we sent into space and tried to breed have all failed, so why would you think humans can breed in low G? With no children there are no colonies, so… Mars is good for robots and short term exploration but will never be a substitute Earth even if we can grow small crops and print homes from the Martian sand. We can make parts look like earth but we can’t make gravity and without proper gravity our bones will melt away and our muscles will fade away and our sperm will fail. Earth is our home, clean it up, care for it and try not to kill one another because we have no other options.