A band of
murderous monkeys on a rock circling one of these stars say, “We must be the reason
for all of this,” shortly after the monkeys blow themselves up.
In the
beginning…
During the
Second World War, a young woman working at a defense plant in Memphis,
Tennessee, and a few of her girlfriends decided to spend a weekend in New Orleans.
At the same
time, a young, married army captain from Georgia, stationed in Arkansas, decided to spend a
weekend in New Orleans
Among hundreds of people enjoying the French Quarter, these two people happened to meet. Liquor was flowing, hormones were firing, and
the woman consented to sex. He did not
use a condom; he did not pull out; it didn’t end in a hand job or a blow job; hundreds
of millions of sperm were ejaculated; by sheer coincidence, the woman had
released an egg. One particular sperm
out of hundreds of millions fertilized the egg, and I was conceived.
There is a
better chance of a butterfly flapping its wings in Brazil causing a storm in
the Atlantic Ocean than of me being conceived.
The young unmarried
woman did not have a miscarriage; for whatever reason, not religious, she did
not have an abortion; and I was born; a singular addition to the two-billion-human
population of the earth at that time; an addition to a race of violent bipedal
apes with just six degrees of separation from their cousins, the chimpanzees.
The war-like
nature and propensity for violence of homo sapiens can be documented from its
very beginning. There is not a time in
recorded history when men somewhere were not at war, killing each other;
churches burning heretics and witches; people tortured and executed over
political differences…
Just in my lifetime: the Second World War, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars, the Iran War, and any number of skirmishes in the name of U.S. security.
Then:
It was a spectacle
to be witnessed; men on horseback, families in wagons bringing fried chicken
and picnic trimmings, spreading blankets on the courthouse lawn, to witness the
hanging of black men in Rolling Fork, Mississippi; so my grandmother, who was
born in the nineteenth century, recounted.
Later:
George W.
Bush lets the assault weapons ban expire… Twenty children, six- and
seven-year-olds, and six adults died at Sandy Hook Elementary School – we said
‘thoughts and prayers’ and moved on.
This is who
we are.
I am an old
man now and have seen almost a century of human foolishness, greed and
violence. We are great apes with a veneer
of civilization to hide our natural propensity for violence, which I believe
will be the apocalyptic we so often prognosticate.
Pump that
oil, don’t worry about climate change; build those data centers and don’t sweat
AI.
There are
approximately 12,187 nuclear warheads scattered across the Earth, the equivalent
of 6,000 megatons or 6,000,000,000 tons of TNT.
The weaponized equivalent of six billion
tons, or twelve trillion pounds of TNT, is in the hands of bipedal monkeys, at the whim of a handful of
old men with a propensity for violence.
At the end…
the OL'Buzzard
How big is a trillion? If you tap the table once every second, twenty-four hours a day, three hundred and sixty-five days a year, with no breaks, it would take you thirty-two thousand years to tap out one trillion...
