prayer culture goddess love

I was just reading Paul Krugman's blog. The name of the blog is something like "Conscience of a Liberal" but I might be all wrong in that guess.  I admire the guy's thinking. He is a Pulizer Prize-winning economist, a Princeton professor and a columnist for the NY fucking Times. The NYTimes publishes some conservative columnists but not many.  Plus, consider I know jack shit about economics, never took a single course in it.

I would like to believe that studying economics makes things better for humanity. I would also like to believe science makes things better. I know materials management and engineering is behind the invention of new tools like iPads and solar energy.  I know we are going to snuff ourselves and the earth out if we don't stop depleting our resources faster than nature can replenish them. It took millions of years to create the stuff in the earth needed to make a touch-screen tablet and all the cables and equipment to make the internet. And I know I am leaving out most details. This is broadstroke speculation offered as preface to even broader declarations below.

I don't think western humankind is on the right track. And I don't think eastern humankind is on the right track.  I want to believe, i.e. I hope, that some people somewhere are thinking right.  I am sure some humans are thinking right. But the right thinkers do not have a lot of power, connection, clout, whatever it takes to be heard and attended.

I think folks are focussed 'out there', looking at the physical world they 'see' with their eyes but the answer lies 'within' us. Once, a guy I met at a conference who I thought would become one of my best, if not my best, friends said to me, soon after we met, when I had hope for friendship, that he was not sure what inner and outer meant. I had asked, I think, if he thought he was an introvert or an extrovert and he said something brilliant. I thought it was brilliant, anyway.  He said he wasn't sure if 'going within himself' to get his energy, which was how I had defined introversion (going inside one's self to get energized) involved actually 'going into the within contained in his body, i.e. his private thoughts, feelings, reflections' or if he was actually going way out into the cosmos when he paused to contemplate 'within' himself. Within or without.  I thought "I have found a partner in my work, this guy would get my work".

Almost seven years later, I am sure he would get my work. If he would spend enough time with me to get it.  But he hasn't spent any time with me, not enough to count.  He has not become my friend. And I feel stupid as I see myself still deeply engaged, inwardly (whatever that means) with the sense I have that getting to know him and being known by him is a portal I need to cross.

Fuck this.

Shake this.

I think humanity is far, far off course. As far as I can tell, and I freely admit I don't know jack shit, that just about everyone is spinning off course. Lots, even most, do good work. But the work is not out there.  Choose any work in the world that you think is good and, I am sorry to suggest, that work is undertaken in a dysfunctional system.

What if aliens did land here and offer to take every human on earth willing to go with them to a better planet where things were just?  Would you go?  Would you trust aliens offering you a trip to another planet?  How would you decide? The capacity to make such a choice, I believe, is where we huma s should be focussed. Yes, yes, in the mean time, we need roads, water, power, food, so until salvation comes or the second coming of Christ or the first, depending on your religious dogma, or depending on religions I don't know about. We need bus drivers, car mechanics, farmers, caregivers, and tools and power so all that stuff has to keep going. It's like a juggling circus act, where the juggller juggles two completely different sets of things in each hand and then, to really dazzle her audience, after she has the two juggling acts in each separate hand, she gets a third one going using one of her feet kicked up behind her. This planet is millions of simultaneous juggling of energy acts, most essential to survival, many helpful for happiness.  All slightly off kilter, slightly misaligned.

I'd settle for feeling aligned with just one person.