Klarinet Archive - Posting 000204.txt from 2000/05

From: Don Longacre <nw2v@-----.com>
Subj: [kl] Re: Bells & Whistles
Date: Thu, 4 May 2000 07:30:15 -0400

>Not you also.>

Not quite, Leo, but I despair of the negative too, and I regret when a situation
casts a shadow of negativism, it might well be a deplorable situation. You are
right in that maturity gives one an intuitive sense of understanding. Not so
much the "been there done that" or "what comes around goes around" school but
more of a hooking together of life's experiences and obvervations. Bill Wright
very recently wrote of the plight of the American Indian in the face of oncoming
"civilized" exploitation. How our history books managed to mangle that one.
The fact that we are wiping out rain forest acreage so fast that only 20% of the
flora and fauna they contain have been cataloged before they are extinct. I wring
my hands when I see high school dropout rates. I see developers exonerate their
greed hiding behind a phoney "smart growth" credo and three generations down the
line our kid's kids ask, "Daddy, what's a trout stream?" I see this intuitively.
Richard Feynman once wrote that quantum leaps in physics have been predicated on
intuition, a third-eye guide without benefit of emperical identification. I see
this clearly and don't really need MIT to tell me about the nature of things.
Trouble is, this maturity insight phenomena, like dessert, occurs lastly in our
lifetime. William Wordworth's "The world is too much with us" can be paraphrased
to: We are too much for the world. One of the enigmas of biology is, following
eons of mutation to accommodate to ones environment and ultimately give rise to
higher primates such as ourselves, how come we have a brain larger than necessary
and only use a fraction of it? Its curious. I personally tend to think that
unless we make a course correction we are going to propagate ourselves out of
existance. Hows that for long haul intuition?

Don Longacre
Think and think critically--(think or thwim)

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