BARREL OF MONKEYS: "GENESIS" in Reverse


I consider myself a Democrat. Been called a Socialist. Definitely a bleeding heart liberal.


As a child from a traditional southern family, playing Barrel of Monkeys on the floor, church every Sunday, doing well in public school, learning a trade; in every sense privileged .........


Comfortable in middle age, an avid news reader, on learning the tragic story of a full grown chimpanzee destroying the face of a woman who offered a toy, only trying to help it's owner coax her surrogate child back into his cage......


Today being confrontational, ribald, offensive, restless, rebellious.......


How did I get here from there?


Search This Blog

Monday, December 25, 2000

"H" is for.......




HEAVEN
Humanity
Homo Sapien
Hunter
Harvester
Historian
Heathen
Heretic
Homosexual
           8

            8
Heterosexual
Home
Haven
Harbor
Heritage
Hereditary
Homage
Hierarchy
Honor
Honesty
Happiness
Hatred
Hell

HUMILITY


THE MISSING LINK...?
Shortest Distance 
Between 
Heaven and Hell


***

"The hypocrite's crime is that he bears false witness against himself. What makes it so plausible to assume that hypocrisy is the vice of vices is that integrity can indeed exist under the cover of all other vices except this one. Only crime and the criminal, it is true, confront us with the perplexity of radical evil; but only the hypocrite is really rotten to the core."

 ~Hannah Arendt, On Revolution,
1963





PALE BLUE DOT



Carl Sagan's
"Reflections on a Mote of Dust"

"We succeeded in taking that picture [from deep space], and, if you look at it, you see a dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever lived, lived out their lives. The aggregate of all our joys and sufferings, thousands of confident religions, ideologies and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilizations, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every hopeful child, every mother and father, every inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every superstar, every supreme leader, every saint and sinner in the history of our species, lived there on a mote of dust, suspended in a sunbeam.


"The earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in glory and in triumph they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of the dot on scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner of the dot. How frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, are challenged by this point of pale light.


"Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity -- in all this vastness -- there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. It is up to us. It's been said that astronomy is a humbling, and I might add, a character-building experience. To my mind, there is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly and compassionately with one another and to preserve and cherish that pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known."

                                                                              
"One thing I like about the Digital age: having the dictionary at my fingertips, how easy it is to look up unfamiliar words as I go along reading." "At least....... until, I played my first game of SCRABBLE on the internet. Wow! I had no idea you could spell so many words with seven letters every time." "Now I feel pressured to catch up!"