June 2009

–Violence touches many victims besides the obvious ones, and we ought to include them in our thoughts– Erik von Brunn, the son of the man who shot the guard at the Holocaust museum, said he felt remorse and thought his father ought to have died instead of the 39-yer-old Mr. Johns. His statement also said that he did not share his father’s extremist views which had long burdened his family. Yes, Mr. Johns was the obvious victim, but Erik von Brunn is one also. Will be ever forget that his father killed an innocent man just out of hatred? How will he ever make peace with that?
Earlier today I spoke with a friend mourning the death of a dog her former daughter in law had, out of spite, let out of the house on Pacific Coast Highway because the dog belonged to her former husband with whom she is in a custody battle. “ I thought of the person who ran over the dog,” my friend said, “who probably couldn’t see it coming in front of the car and who will from now on always remember he or she ran over a dog.” It’s easy to put oneself in the place of that person. Accidentally killing a dog running across a highway is something that could happen to any of us. Even if we end up only a victim of circumstances instead of as in this case one of spite, we’re still caught in a web of violence.
There are so many forgotten and overlooked victims in so many crimes, acts of violence and accidents, people who deserve our thoughts and compassion just as much as those who are officially declared victims.

–A comment by an astronomer becomes a catalyst for thinking about looking at our culture–Frank Drake is a 79 year-old astronomer and astrophysicist, founder of the SETI project that looks for extraterrestrial transmissions, someone who approaches his field academically and not prone to some of the notions usually associated with ET seekers. In an interview with the German magazine Der Spiegel Drake said that daytime television might be aliens’ first taste of life on earth and that he found that scary. Aliens or anyone looking for us in space are likely to first see the soaps because the transmitted signals go into space first before they reach one’s TV set. The idea of those soaps and the notion they would give a scary image of who we are is provocative. We usually think of finding aliens, speculate on who they would be, but give little or no thought to what they might think of us. Extending that further, how often do we think of the image our culture projects? Are we as superficial as the image of daytime soap operas would indicate? Is that a picture of who we want to be? What would be a symbol of our culture? We watch so much reality TV would that be a better or worse image of who we are? And taking this exercise a step further, what is the idea of humanity we ought to cultivate and move towards?

–Government may be seen as inefficient, but GM and other corporations have shown themselves to be worse. Factoring in human limitations may yield better results–We often allow so called conventional wisdom to dictate our views with little thought that CW is not always based on fact. We, for example, hold on to the notion that government-run programs are inefficient, bureaucratic and wasteful. The question ought to be, are they more so than the private sector? Many say, yes indeed. And yet if that were so GM would still be the beacon of American industry and business it had been until its demise. And would banks have pushed sub-prime loans and doctor their books to make them look they were bringing in profits when in fact they were loosing money? Our current economic crisis is the result of several corporations being inefficient (Bears Sterns… Lehman… AIG, GM et al.), bureaucratic (don’t we hear how the GM mindset helped to defeat the corporation?) and wasteful (what about those bonuses to AIG and others)?
When we now hear that government may play a role in the future of healthcare, many tremble and raise their dander. It would seem that the limitations of human nature are a far more apt culprit than government, and those are as likely to occur in government as in the corporate sector. The way to address the problem may not be to think in terms of what sector will do what, (how much and who will pay may be more relevant) but how to protect whatever new program from the known current limitations of our specie.