Humans as deeply selfish and self-interested electro-mechanical meatbags which somehow contain consciousness and a conscience, have tremendous abilities to recognise patterns and to catastrophise things. Entire treatises have been written about the benefits of selfishness and arguably selfishness is the core driver which underpins economics.
It is also probably true that apart from accident and natural disasters, every single bad thing that has happened to us since the beginning of time has been the result of someone's selfishness and/or stupidity. Note that I haven't included laziness in there as laziness is a result of someone's selfishness and/or stupidity.
As individuals we are mostly powerless to do very much in a complex world, unless we form collective purchasing arrangements and collective effort arrangements such as families, clubs, churches, corporations, partnerships, association, and nation states. Sometimes, those very big collective purchasing arrangements and collective effort arrangements produce singular moments of insane complexity and dare I say it, wonder.
A little over 50 years ago, the United States sent 12 clowns to the moon. To the moon!
Even though the technology which underpinned the rockets ultimately came out of selfishness and the desires of a few German people to inflict the results of selfishness and cruelty on the world, and even while those clowns were on the moon there was other selfishness and cruelty being inflicted by other hmans on each other back on Earth by way of the Vietnam War, that little patch of collective effort arrangements was a bright spot in an otherwise cruel and heartless world.
On the Apollo 8 mission to fly around the moon, in one of three missions before people landed on its surface, the three astronauts read the beginning of Genesis 1; in an event which would be later challenged for legality for using government property for religious purposes. I now include that audio.
I have no idea if you are religious or not or even anti-religious but the point that I want to draw out here on September 11, which is a day which has also gone down in history for its selfishness and stupidity and which triggered still more selfishness and stupidity, is that we still live on a Good Earth.
The sun still comes up and it still goes down. Although we have almost certainly caused massive environmental damage which is going to change the weather through the effects of global warming, the chemistry, the physics, the systems, which actually sustain life upon this planet, still work. I very much think that we should direct our collective purchasing arrangements and collective effort arrangements as well as the power of our collective selfishness to look after our big spaceship because we still live on a Good Earth.
2020 which in 2019 we would have only associated with the word 'vision' is with hindsight an annus horriblus which was repeatedly warned about but which thanks to selfishness and stupidity by governments, we took very little effort to do anything about. With 2020 hindsight though, everything has come into sharp clarity. Perhaps what isn't clear amidst the Coronademic is that even in spite of our collective purchasing arrangements and collective effort arrangements being inadequate and people still arguing for their own personal selfishness and stupidity to be enacted, clouds still race across the sky, the rivers still run, the winds still blow and the trees are still eating sunlight and pooping out oxygen because we still live on a Good Earth.
If you want a distraction from the natural disaster which has currently made our lives temporarily unpleasant and if you are allowed to, go outside. Look at the trees; walk through a park or a woodland or a field; stare at the ocean. Cry if you need to. Yell all kinds of cuss words into the sky if that helps. The earth is an impersonal thing which isn't capable of caring and more importantly isn't capable of judging you.
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