March For Science Day
We have a foreboding of an America in
my children’s or grandchildren’s time—
when the United States is a service and
information economy; when nearly all the
manufacturing industries have slipped
away to other countries; when awesome
technological powers are in the hands of a
very few, and no one representing the public
interest can even grasp the issues; when the
people have lost the ability to set their own
agendas or knowledgeably question those
in authority; when clutching our crystals
and nervously consulting our horoscopes,
our critical faculties in decline, unable
to distinguish between what feels good
and what’s true, we slide, almost without
noticing, back into superstition and
darkness.—Carl Sagan
The biggest problem facing us is the problem of maintaining the chain of generations. It’s a problem of coherence, of meaning, of divine signal versus amateurish noise. —anonymous
3 thoughts on “March For Science Day”
Forewarned is not necessarily forearmed. There have been hundreds, if not thousands, of warnings against tyranny and the steady encroachment of ignorance over the past 100 years. Most of these warnings have come from brilliant minds whose vision saw well beyond their own contemporary society. Prescient Orwellian nightmares we have placed on some obscure shelf, relegating them to the genre of fiction, yet they are coming to fruition in real time. Perhaps we cannot heed them until we are drowning in a self-inflicted doomsday stew. If that’s the case, we are too late to alter our course. Can humanity call for a Mulligan and restart from scratch? Maybe that’s our only choice.
I resonate with the spirit of your lament. I wish that humanity could call (pray) for a Mulligan, a second chance, a reboot. I don’t expect any such massive stroke of good fortune. I know that you would agree that there is no dispensation from cause and effect. Perhaps what is truly different this time around, is the rate of change. Due to the exponential growth of knowledge, technology, and population —the transformation of Nature and of societies is a time line of years, sometimes even months. This is occurring before our eyes, well within our lifetime.
“We have met the enemy and he is us”
Pogo – a.k.a. Walt Kelly, 1972
Never have truer words been said.