Sometimes I lose sight there’s around eight billion people in this world. Only about five and a half million reside within my geographic region, somewhere in the central northern midsection of North America, a small and obscure territory equally colonized by eastern assets and west coast mass media. The city where I live, which has a 19th Century made-up name, has barely a population of half a million, but the metropolitan area all around makes up about three and a half million residents. I have to stop and think, that’s peanuts compared to Mexico City.
There’s estimated to be 258 million people classified as migrants on the planet right now, people not living in the country where they were born, about 3.2 percent of the world’s population. That’s about 29 Mexico Citys. Or 28 Tokyos. 30 New York Citys. 516 times the size of my home town.
We talk about a small world. That’s a lot of people, and if they ever got together in one territory they would make up a formidable force. Like a big fierce mondo mega Israel.
From my perspective, an American baby boomer from the virtual boomdocks, there”s always an elegant solution to things hiding in plain sight. Common sense is supposed to dictate a reasonable outcome. Where I come from we try to learn from mistakes, and we learn to try not to make mistakes. Maybe we are less risky, or just less frisky.
The culture where I live has learned from historical mistakes such as slavery and aboriginal genocide and come out a 21st Century hybrid of restorative backlash and no true forgiveness, but it can be a start towards healing and creating a just tomorrow.
In some ways, my culture employs doubletalk to avoid confrontation and at the same time uses it to make a point passive aggressively. This is how we get along around here where I live.
The world all around generates frightful news. Does this mean information is now being known and communicated around the planet more comprehensively than at any other time in human history, allowing that upheavals, mayhem and catastrophe, evil and injustice occurred all the time, all along, as they say largely unreported? Underreported. Global media truly democratizes information even as it spreads misinformation and disinformation at the same time, it offers equal opportunity storytelling and factual assertions into the atmosphere of knowledge. Facts can be verified.
News of the battles of the Greco-Persian War probably never crossed the minds of citizens within the Wall of China or living under the Gupta Empire of India. It took almost two millennia to uncover forgotten Pompeii. It used to take years and years of anthropology and archaeology to uncover and piece together the past history of humans on this planet in the context of the planet’s own age, when nobody we know was around to witness dynamic cataclysms forming the earth before people had language to describe its beauty and its terrors.
Now practically every soul on earth can know about an earthquake in Japan, or even near Tehran. The wildfires of Australia and California. The flood of Venice. Hurricanes. Where disaster strikes somebody records and reports it. It gets repeated and everybody knows. If they want. Some Chinese couldn’t still care less about the Greco-Persian War, but they might be interested in contemporary events occurring in that region of the world. It’s amazing how much access people have to information in real time. It’s hard to believe today that Hitler’s Nazi regime was able to keep the Holocaust hush hush only eighty years ago. A hundred years and on, Armenians grieve genocide at the hands of the Ottomans. Rohingya perish in Burma.
Today everyone’s smart phone records and transmits dispatches sent from around the world. We’re seeing riots in Hong Kong, Baghdad and La Paz over unfulfilled political expectations. It’s as though people have more democracy than they know what to do with, like guns in America, more freedom than they can handle. I’m being facetious. Watching countries fall, collapsing from within from civil discord over fundamental rights and basic needs, is a sad sight. It was horrifying to be able to witness ISIS atrocities proudly touted on social media, or the massacre at the mosque at a place named, of all things, Christchurch. Ironies abound.
Mass communication exposes secret detention/reeducation campuses for Uigars in western China. Contradictions between authoritarians and libertarians govern traffic on the information super highway. What a Middle American pedestrian observer might interpret as the End Times, Antichrists abundant. Except that’s been said before.
What you can say and get away with in this world relies on who isn’t listening. Audience prevention poses a significant challenge. It’s hard enough to come up with something interesting to read much less squeeze between censors and curators, moderators, compliance auditors, trolls and squealers, between the lines. This comes from an American blogger who writes from the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave. It ain’t easy being free or brave. Our Constitution guarantees our right to remain silent or anything we say may be used against us in a court of law. That seems fair. I enjoy this space on the internet by the grace of the worldwide web and don’t take for granted this risk.
There’s this local woman who runs a shelter and soup kitchen called Sharing and Caring Hands. Her name is Mary Jo Copeland and she finances the place without any government assistance. This time of year they run their fundraising spiel on TV and radio with her narration, and she says, “To the world you might be only one person. But to that person you might be the world.”
That makes no sense. And yes it does.
It amazes me whenever this website gets hits from outside North America. I think of my work as colloquial. Neoprovincial. Quasi-primitive. Its quality hardly qualifies for national attention, although 77% of my readers are in the United States. Beyond the borders, Canada and Mexico account for around 6% each, not surprising, being neighbors, as I’ve written specifically about Mexico’s hospitality and Canadians who winter down there. What shocks me is that almost 2% of my readers are in China. It isn’t so much my doubt that Chinese readers might care about the musings of a proletarian shlub seven thousand miles away, it’s more a wonder that my content gets past their censors, given at any time in any essay I might sympathize with citizens of Hong Kong, criticize President Xi or Chairman Mao, or grieve for Tiananmen Square, or as I mentioned earlier the roundup and detention of Uighurs. 2% of all readers to me is much more than a few assigned moderators just checking me out on behalf of the Central Committee. This leaves me both amazed to get through the Chinese Firewall and to have actually interested a bunch of Chinese readers.
More readers than in the UK, which surprises me because I have higher readership expectations, or wishes, from the land of my language than a meager 1.4%, even when you throw in a handful of hits from Ireland. Not that I’ve ever written more than a few lines about John Lennon, or argued against Brexit, marveled at Stonehenge, praised the National Gallery or testified to kicking the wall at Galway Bay.
Astonishing to me are the numbers from Brazil and India, which rank sixth and seventh in readers. One is the biggest single entity of South America and the other the most populous democracy in the world, both nearly inscrutable to my neocolonial education, and both critical crucibles of social, political, economic and environmental conditions in the 21st Century. What am I saying that would possibly interest them?
More than France and Spain, which round off the top 9 at nine. France I get because they are French and not beholding to anyone, and guys who think they love Paris are a europenny a dozen. Lately they’ve been reading the essays about Ixtapa Zihuatanejo, so maybe they’ll turn up in Mexico this winter with the Quebecois — who needs another rhapsody in English about how cool is the Musee D’Orsay? As for Spain, anyplace in the world with Madrid and Barcelona both in the same country though miles and miles apart can be excused for ignoring the naive gibberish of an American tourist facing Guernica, Las Meninas, and Sagrada Familia for the first time, but there are readers of mine by the dozens.
The top ten is closed by Indonesia, almost half of one percent of the total, just less than Spain. This really intrigues me. Why Indonesia? What appeal does a confessional white American urban senior citizen ranting about newspaper delivery have for somebody living in the South Seas 9,000 miles away?
The analytics provided by my platform host tell me what country my readers come from but can’t tell me exactly where or who they are. Some search criteria used to find me is available but sometimes not. I see what gets read — or at least viewed. I know nothing about the visitors except if they comment or make contact. To date I have been read in 50 countries.
Several of those countries are onesies and twosies. There are curious smatterings from places like Israel, Pakistan, Germany, Sweden, South Africa, the Netherlands, Italy, Uganda, Russia, South Korea and Singapore. Among the one-timers are Vietnam, El Salvador, Angola, Tajikistan, Saudi Arabia and Poland — what attracted them in the first place and why they haven’t returned I don’t know.
With 195 countries in this world, my blog has made an impression in at least a quarter of them. Not bad for a nobody from nowhere. (With nothing to say, you might add.) By the numbers most are from the rich world, but there is no way to know if they are in fact rich, and of the economically marginal countries whether the readers are, but I hope you all enjoy rich imaginations.
Most of the countries you can think of where no one has read this blog are places preoccupied with other issues such as daily survival, even among the country’s elite. This man’s message resonates not at all to a citizen of Congo, I imagine. Then again, I’m amazed somebody in Tajikistan found me. Somebody from Bangladesh. Azerbaijan. There are issues with access to the worldwide web in places my blog has never been — either sparse networks, little mass technology (if you can imagine) and prioritized usage — or else content is regulated and blocked. It’s no surprise to see no readers from Syria or Iran. Burma or North Korea. It hurts my feelings there’s never been a reader from Switzerland; the country is a cute little benevolent police state, but I don’t think I’m being blocked, just ignored. There’s never been a reader from Latvia either and I don’t take it personally. Same with Norway, a place where a significant number of migrants who settled my region came from. I’ve never had a reader in Somalia even though the largest Somali refugee migrant population in the United States is literally in my neighborhood, so it’s possible a Somali might be a reader here in my home town, where a Somali refugee immigrant naturalized citizen represents us in the US House of Representatives.
Small world.
In the time it took Philippides, the messenger who ran the 26.2 miles to Athens to deliver the news the Persians lost the battle at Marathon and the Greeks won, about 24 billion messages course the worldwide web. In the time it took Roland to carry the good news from Ghent to Aix, all the cable networks and news apps, blogs and even some print media will have reported the news, discussed it, analyzed it, investigated it and several You Tube and podcast productions will ensue. And in the time it took Sheridan’s ride to Cedar Creek, by the time Sheridan was twenty miles away a joint air strike and infantry counterattack inspired by satellite and drone imagery, delivered with surgical precision, would have rendered the rebels toast, and by Sheridan’s arrival he would be briefed about the battle’s aftermath and mop up operations. Paul Revere’s Ride? They’re coming. Click.
We live in interesting times. Interesting long as I can remember. Those who decried, history is finished — what a terrible conceit. We live on the cuttingest edge of history. The blade is a sharp laser and we seem to wield it like a guillotine. Like a stone axe.
Every epic Greek play, all the dramas of Shakespeare, the plots of great literature and themes of classic cinema are taking place every day in real life on this planet. All the world’s classical expressions of cultural foment and honor are simultaneously occurring in the societies of humans abundant in this world. Even the origin stories play themselves over and over.
For all we know, and all we don’t know, for all the knowledge collected over millennia and by the minute, humanity has no excuse for its behavior towards itself in the furtherance of life on this planet. In this age of interesting times we should all know better than to corrupt our survival with mutually destructive acts of war, inhumanity and flagrant demolition of the environment, engaging in practices sure to kill us all.
Maybe all at once, but most likely we’ll snuff out slowly over agonized generations unless the consensus of power that determines the socioeconomic systems employed by human institutions pays attention to the trends it is creating now for its future generations. It could begin with consideration of the 250 or so million migrants, the ones in camps and the diasporas on the fringes of the rich world, and those millions of lives disrupted by violence, terror, war, persecution and the threat of death, who chose escape instead. They live among us in the shadows, the ones who get prayed for on Sundays, sometimes Saturdays. Our criminally homeless. Our refugees. If these people are created out of the conditions manufactured by our power structure, then the power structure owes itself accountable to address the causes as well as humanely remedy the effects of migration. The young adults and the kids, what is to become of their lives if they ever get out? With their homelands destroyed there may be no reason to go back. Will they find homes and community, jobs and trades or remain outcasts and shadows in our slums? A generation of insurgents or new leaders towards better society?
When one addresses these, the least of the well off of the human race, one sees straight into these interesting times. The wars in the Middle East, western Asia and all over Africa push migrants towards Europe. Why not dream big? Central Americans chased from their homelands by gangster cartels as ruthless as ISIS or persecuted by a government as repressive as Assad like to come to the USA for the same reason. These refugees are poor but they’re not dumb. They see Hollywood. Bollywood. Disney World Orlando. Disney Paris. Most refugees end up encamped in nearby countries as poor as their own or face segregation from any mainstream societies in compounds away from the capitals of the EU, but they have found a form of safety and now depend on hope that this camp might be one step into a good life and not the end of the line permanently.
It isn’t always war and political persecution. Sometimes it’s natural disaster and famine. Earthquakes, hurricanes, droughts, monsoons, floods and wildfires drive migration, and for the most part there’s little human societies can do but have contingency plans. Bad governments can make matters worse, both with indifferent response and malfeasant resource management.
Whatever the reason, these castaways of civilization personify the disparity of living conditions on this planet. It’s not helpful when societies block their own gateways into the good life, one of the lessons learned by now.
Thus poverty is perpetuated through stigma. Revolt under such circumstances is inevitable. And violent resistance is futile. Eventually the conflicts prove fatal. Time and again young students take up the voices of the stigmatized and are shut down by the power of the state. There’s no sign yet that the autocrats, oligarchs and plutocrats are thinking through their approach to governing masses of people and designing democratic institutions and rules of law to be justly applied to everyone so the institutions live on to serve and protect future generations. No sign of dictators stepping aside anytime soon. Signs of more Tiananmen Squares appear more likely.
This observation comes from an American participant in the era of social unrest known as the Sixties, the mommy of all modern social disruption and the template for every contemporary mass movement worldwide that involves public demonstrations and civil disobedience. Sometimes I think the rest of the world is having its Sixties. In America we had race riots burning whole sections of cities, and antiwar protests that got out of hand and ended up not so peaceful. Historians attribute the source of the protest attitude of the Sixties to French radicals at universities in Paris, but the American black civil rights marches actually set the protocol for every mass demonstration in this world ever since. That there’s ample evidence the civil rights rallies and peace marches actually worked, or at least had an effect on the outcomes desired, can only offer hope to citizens everywhere who want to made themselves seen and heard taking a stand for democracy, human rights and justice. From an insider’s view, however, after half a century pondering results measured by social change, mass outpourings of mobs in the streets, day after day, will eventually push any regime past its tipping point and it will do whatever is necessary to restore order and enforce its will. Since the 1960s in America more profound means of communication have been devised to demonstrate outrage and influence public opinion.
Yes, it’s a beautiful thing when millions of people assemble in peace at places like the Mall in Washington DC on a special day to praise virtues, extol liberty and justice and brag about the exceptional qualities of democratic ideals. Then everybody has to back to work, back to school, back to friends and families, back into the day to day stuff of their communities and practice what it is they hold so dear they spent a day at a public square celebrating with a bunch of like minded people.
Angry mobs don’t bode well for anybody within miles of the epicenter of the anger. Mobs who create riots and wreck property and bait the police have no business asserting political demands in the name of others who may even express similar opinions. What is it this fascination with setting tires on fire? Inciting riots isn’t leadership. It surrenders all negotiating collateral. It breaches terrorism.
Of course you have to have at least a semblance of civil society to experience civil protests and demonstrations. There are outlying regions of the world where a band of rogues with guns determines who says what and how much. There isn’t much internet there, and whoever might have it probably are the ones with the guns. In denser outlying societies where you don’t see mass demonstrations it’s because there is no coherent government to protest against. In many places the territory is contested between this or that militia, or this or that cartel. You protest these dudes you disappear. It’s when thugs like these take over mobs in the cities who are parts of organized protests against government policies and turn the public campaign into armed insurrection with car bombs and suicide vests that all hell breaks loose. There are a lot of civil wars going on in this world right now.
Small world indeed.
The contagion of armed conflict contradicts assertions attributed to the Better Angels of human nature that global violence is declining. (Steven Pinker.) Allow me to play Devil’s Advocate with an elitist pose to pessimize. With the speed of light on the wordwide web incitement to commit mass homicide spreads faster than can be rationally contained. The means of mass destruction are within the grasp of bathtub chemists. There may not be enough good will in this world to deter a podge of zealots from sacrificing lives like yours and mine to project their domination. Where’s the democracy in that?
Gradually undermining even the most elected regimes and furtively sabotaging the most fiendish authoritarian is the human impact on the planet’s ecology and effects on climate change. Notable for its deplorable exceptionalism, the government of the United States backed out of the Paris Climate Agreement of 2016 which commits nations to reduce the atmospheric release of carbon emissions to forestall global warming. America in effect is saying to the rest of the world’s 194 countries who signed the agreement, nope, it can’t be done, don’t bother to try. America, who used to pride itself leader of the free world, now admits to leading the way for perfectly unrestrained carbon waste, as if pledging to do the exact opposite of the Paris goals. The president calls climate change due to global warming a hoax perpetrated by the fake news media who are the enemies of the people, and people believe him. It seems so Soviet. None of his followers seems to care about the consequences of ignoring the scientific data and instead of continuing to regulate and restrict emissions go ahead and loosen existing limits as if to double down on the right to pollute. If America doesn’t care, why should India, or Ghana?
Official policy favors the coal, oil and gas — fossil resource — industries, as well as heavy metal extraction. From petroleum we get plastics, and from plastics the oceans are forming small continents of accumulated waste. The results of anybody who guiltlessly tossed a Bic lighter overboard thinking, oh well, it’s just one. We who heat our homes with natural gas really have little choice in the market for fuel except perhaps electricity often generated with the assistance of fossil fuel. For the sake of the planet would you believe it if the coal, oil and gas industries divested in extraction to invest in futuristic energy technology and gradually put itself out of business? Proven fossil fuel reserves prove irresistible to dig, tap and pump. Whole corrupt oligarchies control the supplies, and you and I are the demand.
In Minnesota, the state where I live, a couple of international mining conglomerates want to operate copper and nickel mines. This region is famous for iron ore mining that made steel mills rich the past century, and today there are immense proven seams of copper and nickel under the dense woods. The problem is, the mining of copper and nickel pollutes the soil all around the mines and will poison the surrounding lakes and rivers of a pristine wilderness watershed along the border with Canada and other waterways leading to Lake Superior. Besides the mining companies who want the copper and nickel and other associated rare metals, there are towns in the vicinity of a few thousand residents each who want mining jobs at all cost. Opponents of the mines favor the environmental impact. The federal deregulators are pushing mining. The state is delaying the permits pending further impact studies. Minnesota is known as the land of 10,000 lakes, and thanks to urbanization and agriculture there are several bodies of water less than pure, shall we say. Exceptions of purity are found in the far northern reaches like the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness, which will be ruined by mining. The trickle down effect will flow through the whole St Lawrence Seaway eventually. This may not matter at all to residents of Cleveland or Buffalo on the shores of Lake Erie, but Superior is still the cleanest of the North American Great Lakes, and that matters to Canada and should matter to everybody.
When my wife and I travel we get asked where we’re from, and when we tell them, hardly anybody who isn’t American (or Canadian) seems to be able to visualize where it is on a map. Is it near Orlando, Florida? I place us in the middle of the US, up north near the border with Canada. The source of the Mississippi River, if that helps. The western shore of Lake Superior, if anybody knows the Great Lakes.
From this vantage I worry about the fate of the world. The future relies on courageous leaders who can articulate the sense of doing the right thing and persuade people to support actions to make the right things prevail. Ideas need to keep flowing freely so the good ones catch on. Ideologies need to be questioned, merged and transcended for the greater good. Laws must be just and justly applied. Democracy must be the lifeblood of human rights. War and crime must be abolished. Global trade should be free. Public health is a human right, along with public education. Shelter — gimme shelter. And every means necessary should be directed towards mitigating global warming, climate change and the adverse impact human civilizations have on the ecosphere. It’s complicated.
Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro said the other day he expects deforestation of the Amazon rain forest to continue. “Deforestation and fires will never end,” he said. “It’s cultural.”
O que? What? Whose culture is it promotes the destruction of its own habitat? And if there is something cultural about Amazon deforestation, it’s the duty of the cultural leaders to change that aspect of the culture. No, more than likely Senhor Bolsonaro sides with interests who don’t give a shit about the Amazon forest except to generate fast cash in the here and now, and there’s a culture for that too.
Sorrier yet, if Bolsonaro is right then it’s almost genetic proof that humanity is ultimately self-destructive. If enough people accept that then it’s really all a countdown to catastrophe. If all we can expect of our political leaders is crashes and clashes it’s a hopeless loop to a death spiral. Even a president who believes climate change from global warming is bullshit ought to at least wink the other way and go along with the Paris Accords just to play along just in case it works.
In reality, as the warming of the globe continues and the weather and effects of natural elements get nastier, the poor will suffer first and suffer the worst. They already live in some of the world’s crappiest neighborhoods, they’ll be the first swallowed when the tides rise, burned when the fires ignite and buried in the landslides. The poor already live near garbage piles and rivers of open sewage, they will be the first to be sickened by toxins awash in floods. When the land cracks from drought they will be the first to starve from the famines. They’ll be the most killed when the factions take up arms to grab the nice real estate and seize resources. Eventually the poor who want to migrate will have nowhere to go, stranded.
And believe it or not, even the not-poor will be inconvenienced.
Eight billion of us. On Planet Earth. Spread around the globe. Densely populated in places, and some places sparse. 195 nations. Over six thousand spoken languages. Eight billion individuals. Members of families. Neighborhoods. Towns. Cities. Everybody part of a region. Eight billion human beings, all as conscious as you and me. People.
Somehow in the six to twelve thousand years of evolving consciousness, the human race has developed the will to employ communications skills to establish social treaties to bond populations who hardly know each other with philosophies instead of coercion. Never before have the world’s people been linked intellectually. This is why I say we know better than to behave otherwise. As we say in America, ignorance of the law is no excuse. Everybody in this world can know everything there is to know. Can know. The encyclopedia of the universe is everywhere. Yes, there are several reaches of the planet without broadband but these places are identifiable and will infill its technology sooner than later and even today can access satellites. 2.45 billion people — roughly 30% of the world’s people — use Facebook. Alibaba has 617 million customers, Amazon 310 million. Google gets 5.6 billion searches per day. This day and age is a knowledge junkie’s dream. Interesting times? And yes, my vantage is from an obscure and prosperous ivy tower sheltered in the rich world of freedom and democracy, whereas there are places where the internet and its content is restricted, denied, blocked and shut down, not exactly the worldwide web. This is an era of murdered journalists, arrests of publishers and shutdowns of newsrooms among mainstream information carriers to control information, and even in my USA the mass media gets called the enemies of the people and their reporting called fake by the nation’s president. Meanwhile the permissible open channels of internet communication are manipulated to offer misinformation. Yet, as the X Files used to say, the truth is out there.
Way back in the Sixties, people of my generation took on the establishment to end war, hunger, racism, sexism and pollution of the natural environment, and to promote peace, justice and democracy in the world. And legalize marijuana. It feels wrong to admit we lost. After all, if it’s not a zero sum game the game isn’t over. OK Boomer, you might say. Hope you mean it because it’s hard not to feel bad that my generation didn’t all by itself accomplish every single solution it set out for, making a world worth bringing new generations of people. It isn’t fair to pass this world to a new generation without some preparatory guidance, like passing the queen of spades without at least one other spade. It is fair to accept and take seriously young emerging leaders. Greta Thunberg, the young Swedish environmental activist, is around the same age as two of my granddaughters, to whom I have to answer for their cultural inheritance. I’d like them to see I agreed with Greta Thunberg long before she was even born and this awareness of environmental concern is not sudden and new, not granpa being hip and fitting in. Stylin’.
Wherever, whenever in this world they have a Sixties I hope it goes well. So many times, like with the Arab Spring and Tiananmen, things turn out the opposite. It helps when demonstrators demonstrate the responsibility to govern themselves with civil behavior, even in the face of taunts and especially under pressure from radical tempers. Don’t fall for the old We Want The World And We Want It Now, especially if it’s in ALL CAPS. It shows commitment to want something bad enough to want it right away, and changes and trends can happen in a minute, yet democracy and liberty are a long outlook. Short and finite outcomes of behavior lead into threads and networks involving long lasting outcomes, affecting social change organically and not by rule of gun or guillotine. Anarchy is like a vacuum in physics, and nature abhors a vacuum.
For my part I am sorry my generation didn’t solve all the world’s problems so the next generations couldn’t inherit the Earth on cruise control, all wrapped in a blanket and a bow, nothing to do but enjoy this beautiful planet, eat apples and pray thanks. We tried. We gave you MTV and the Eagles. Sorry. Bush and Cheney instead of Al Gore. Alas but don’t tell me you resent handheld computers.
More than half the world’s people have access to a mobile device, pad or smartphone. That includes children. 66%. In theory that’s a lot of democracy. A lot of informed citizens. Social literacy. This is what will drive future human interaction to get along for the sake of the planet, the greater good.
What has always bothered me about the Star Wars movies is the wars never end, the evil empire always seems to dominate the universe and the good guys and the jedi forever fight for survival. It was long long ago and far far away, and here we are on Earth still blowing each other up.
Widespread personal communication made possible by the worldwide web is the next way towards international understanding, the spreading of the stories of the human condition. Some of the stories are going to be lies. Self-serving lies. The answers back will bespeak truth. Sometimes the lies awaken awareness of the liars. Nobody knows if there’s enough intellectual savvy among users of social media to tell real hoaxes from fake ones. There’s a learning curve in all this, but it seems that a lot of good can come from watching You Tube to learn how to repair your own wash machine. Freedom of access both ways on the worldwide web in theory should never be denied on the grounds of the same as the First Amendment of the Constitution of the United States of America, freedom of speech. In practice there is a slippery slope of exceptions which only specially interested fringe groups support but most of society don’t mind seeing banned, like child pornography, human trafficking, terrorism and hate crime. The censorship and banning of ideas is wrong. The trafficking of humans via the internet is wrong but discussing the ideas of human trafficking on the internet might be right but isn’t wrong.
Governing regimes who block internet access have something to hide. In Iran I can’t believe it’s only about gasoline subsidies that citizens have taken to the streets for. My mind says there’s something more on their minds, but the internet has been shut down, no word out or in about their civil condition.
There are some longtime international and internecine feuds that someday will have to be set aside for the greater good of the world order. The place to argue, accuse and reconcile is on the internet.
The species has a great chance right now to own up to its obligation to steward the planet, as it claims, and to gin up enthusiasm among its people to take measures to stabilize the temperature from warming due to human carbon pollution, just for starters.
The meeting place of the minds is the internet. One of the characteristics of intelligence in our species is that we don’t just have brains, we have minds. If allowed to think our way through these interesting times we could confront the eternal demons which torment the human race and examine the mysteries of our hearts searching for something we already belong to bigger than ourselves, a world we can barely pronounce.
BK
Buffalo Kelly 