BUZZARD RAMBLINGS

 

As I grow old, way past my sell-by date, I find it harder to blog;   primarily because I find my give-a-shit factor going off the scale.

  

As my body parts start to wear out I become more of an observer than a participant.    When you are treading water and the shark fins are circling it is hard to be concerned about the people rowing away in the life raft.

It is hard to care.   When I stand aside and look at the violent history of the human race I am some disgusted.

People individually are usually decent and just trying to get by, but when people separate into packs (religions, national identities, political affiliations, racial identities, gangs, mobs, clubs, volunteer groups, etc.) they take on groupthink: people like us are the good guys. 

 

Neil de Grasse Tyson wrote, “The greatest factor of a working democracy is that we get to disagree without killing each other.”

Think about that.    That is a pathetic statement.   It is our groupthink, and especially our male nature to kill each other. 

 

The Young Buzzard; perhaps nine or ten years old
I rest my case. 

What other explanation is there when nations stockpile weapons and individuals buy powerful handguns and assault weapons - other than to prepare to kill each other?

   

That little insecure asshole who carries a weapon into McDonald’s is hoping for an excuse to kill someone to prove his manhood – what other possible explanation is there?

We are, after all, just an advanced breed of monkey.    We can try to separate ourselves from our evolutionary tree by inventing gods in our likeness and touting our material advancements, but our true nature is just under the surface.

Really.   Just look at the insanity of our national conflicts.   There is no solution – this is who we are.     

What point am I trying to make?  

Fuck if I know.

the Ol’Buzzard

I AM SOME DISGUSTED WITH THE HUMAN RACE

 

 

Yesterday I posted about the fusion breakthrough at the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory.  It is truly a breakthrough that could change the future of the human race.   The problem is that I am old and I have seen too much of the human race; a façade of civilization to cover up the most base instinct buried in our DNA.

 

We must step back and realize that the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory is the government entity responsible for all of our nuclear weapons.   Almost all of the technology we enjoy today came as spinoffs of weapon development.

 

Look at the world.  Women are publicly beaten by the morality police and there are religious beheadings throughout the Moslim world; The Uighurs in China are forced into labor camps; There are gulags in North Korea and Russia; school girls are kidnapped in Nigeria by Boko Haram and forced into marriages; Untouchables still exist as an underclass in India; Russia is bombing the civilian population of Ukraine; China has the largest navy in the world and is threatening Taiwan; North Korea is developing long-range missiles that could reach the United States carrying nuclear warheads; The United States, one of the most warlike nations ever to exist, invaded Iraq to replace Saddam Hussein and ended up destroying the country and killings thousands-of-times more people than the despot replaced…  

Look at our history and look at the atrocities man commits in the name of politics, religion, and ego.   From the first mythical family when Cain killed Able, mankind has shown itself the most violent and destructive animal to ever inhabit the earth.

 

 

The invention of a clean, eco-friendly, unlimited power source has the potential to change the world for the better; but that would be disregarding who we are.  

 

These are the things the Ol’Buzzard thinks of when he can only sleep five or six hours a night.

the Ol’Buzzard

I AM A MICROCOSM OF THE EARTH.

I yam what I yam what I yam what I yam...

You can call it chaos theory, the butterfly effect or just chance; but each of us are who we are as the results of chance. 

Not only that, but our lives are a microcosm of the development of life on the earth.  

Using me as an example:

Had my mother not been ovulating the night I was conceived.

Had my father, whoever he was, used a condom.

Had a different sperm fertilized the egg.

Had my mother chosen an abortion rather than carry me to term.

Had my grandmother not raised me.

Had we not moved to Mississippi when I was eight years old.

Had I not joined the Navy directly out of high school

After my first hitch in 1963 I got out of the military.  I had ninety days to reenlist and retain my rank.   I was laid off from my job at Christmas time and couldn’t find a job – no unemployment back then. 

One week after I reenlisted I was notified I had been accepted for the Maine State Police Academy.

In 1967 I requested an inter-service transfer from the Navy to the Army’s attack helicopter pilot program.  Before the paperwork was approved I crushed my ankle in an automobile accident.

Had the driver been driving three miles per hour faster, or slower…

Had I not been stationed where I met my wife.

Had she not been attracted to me

Had we not gone to college together

Had we not majored in education

Had we not attendee a lecture on teaching in the Indian villages of Alaska.

Had we not gone to Alaska

You can see where this is going.

The hundreds of choices I made, and the tens-of-thousands of happenstances that I had no control over have resulted in me, in my seventies, living in a cabin in northwestern Maine, with a beautiful young wife and two Maine Coon Cats. 

I am who I am who I am who I am – by chance.

There is no reason to believe that if we turned back the clock to the morning before I was conceived that the results would turn out the same.

I am a microcosm of the earth.

If we could turn back the clock to the time when the first microscopic life evolved on this earth, there is no reason to believe that 3.8 billion years later there would be bipedal, upright walking, pseudo-intelligent mammal proclaiming a god in its own image.

We are who we are who we are by the most minuscule chance.

the Ol’Buzzard