Thank You.

And now even truth must present itself as a profound and circular irony. That's what time it really is.

Great "post".

"Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so." - Ford Prefect, ' The Hitch-hikers Guide to the Galaxy'.

When I want a break,

for sanity's sake,

I go and work in my garden.

How wonderful to find this truthful portrayal of what life is like in today's world of technology. I was just lamenting yesterday to a fellow animal rescue comrade, face to face I might add, that no one seems to have time to talk anymore, or even more surprising, regarding customer service, there is no longer "customer service".

In today's gadget world it's relatively easy to assume "you're the one" with the problem since everyone else seems oblivious to it. Of course "everyone else" is who is on the iPhone, iPod, cell phone or whatever the electronic screen happens to be; and that “everyone else” is rarely, if ever, making direct eye contact or listening fully to what you’re saying.

I remember a time when a friend would call on the now defunct land line and we'd strike up a conversation, impromptu, that lasted minutes and sometimes well into an hour. There is no such thing any longer. It seems I now have to make an appointment or set aside a pre-arranged official time to talk to people that once were not so burdened by all these commitments. I had one friend tell me a while back he thinks about calling quite often but due to the length of time our conversations often endure, he simply can't do that anymore.

Am I missing something? Wasn't there a time when catching up with an old friend actually meant "catching up", meaning the conversation spanned topics that included laughter, sometimes sorrow, maybe a little haughty gossip and very often commiseration about one thing or another? This is why I devote my life to animals; they live in the moment. Every memorable observation or snapshot I have of some extraordinary nature scene happens when I’m walking my dog or taking a hike. There is no electronic gadget anywhere near either of those scenes.

Once I observed a flock of Common Egrets flying east in the morning as the sun was rising turning the egret’s plumage the brilliant rose color of the sunrise. Excited and surprised, I looked around to see if anyone else was there to share in the wonder; all I could see were the neon blue lights flashing from inside a house because the television was on. I’m talking about 6 am in the morning.

Here's my question: how can we hope to heal an imperiled planet when everyone is staring at an electronic screen?

Can you feel the evil
Can you hear the wail
The sound of destiny sharpening its nails
The scent of corruption from a race called Man
The Beast now declares it's time to bloody the land
Beware, the sloth

Can you hear the war
Can you feel the plague
As it slowly moves along the path you've made
Now it's right behind you
You can run no more
It's time to pay the piper
Time to settle the score
Beware, the sloth

Realize you're the mother
Of this demon you face
You have given birth to the end of our race
You look for someone to blame
Only the dead are around
The Beast, he knows you by name
And in his wrath you'll go down
Beware, the sloth

Saint Vitus, Sloth
www.youtube.com/watch?v=VAv-EDNg1D4

Like!

Oh, wait ...

Kill your television

Randall: Thank you for an insightful article.
I love the description on your resume. I think it is a gift to be teaching students seeking a heightened voice for themselves and humanity. And probably the irony goes without saying - the ones enrolled in your program of Peace Studies have probably already found what they are searching, while the ones that would benefit are nowhere to be found.

I found your analysis of our current state of techno-overdose pretty accurate, that which was to liberate us, as in fact ensnared us into becoming a society of garbage collectors – too distracted from pertinent matters, yet always ready to shout “do it to Julia” as long as there was no repercussions to ourselves.

I’m reminded of this by a short story by Lars Eighner – On Dumpster Diving, an account of the Author’s three years experience living on the refuse or waste of others. Reading the story, one never feels he is made to emphasize with the plight of the author’s fall from grace, but the reader is drawn to a deeper appreciation for an [Art] most would dismiss as unfortunate circumstances. He concludes: “Anyway, I find my desire to grab for the gaudy bauble has been largely sated. I think this is an attitude I share with the very wealthy – we both know there is plenty more where what we have came from. Between us are the rat-race millions who have confounded their selves with the objects they grasp and who nightly scavenge the cable channels looking for they know not what.
I am sorry for them.” By the end he has earned your respect.

Searching for garbage in the land of plenty is so condescendingly sneered at when the vision is in three dimensional form yet warmly embraced as that of a baby’s breath when it enters into the first person's own cultural domain through an indirect medium.

Michel Foucoult: "There is no binary division to be made between what one says and what one doesn't say; we must try to determine the different ways of not saying things"
One’s experience becomes the communicative [truth] that is the personal [real] regardless of this or that theory - much like telling time.

Over 69 Countries along with our natives and indigenous people the world over have known this to be true way before we stopped counting time by mechanical means.

Let's for-go the patent on humility and distribute it freely.

"It's like everyone is pushing towards the bow of the Titanic to snap a photo of that massive iceberg up ahead on their cell phone cameras...... No matter that the Doomsday Clock stands at five minutes to midnight - that's an eternity when things move at the speed of micro-circuitry. It's all an abstraction anyway, a live action film version of reality; even war is played with joysticks like a cutting-edge video game." -Randall Amster

There is of course considerable irony in taking this wonderfully composed essay urging us all to go on a digital diet via the medium of Common Dreams. Regardless, very nice work, professor Amster.

Before the invention of the first mechanical clocks, European communities (like most cultures, according to anthropologists) collectively kept track of time by gazing at the skies, and observing the change of the seasons. Often, special priests or priestesses were specifically tasked to keep track of what time it was, so that communal holiday festivals would be coordinated to recur annually, biannually, quarterly, or whatever. Before clocks existed, a day simply commenced when the sun came up, and ended when it went back down. Cross-culturally, the division of a waking period unit of time was often marked by calls for public prayer rituals, with sometimes a special day set aside for common feasting, market activity, or purely religious celebration.

The invention of the first reliable mechanical twelve hour clock appeared in Europe somewhere between 1200 and 1300 I believe. Major cities - Paris, Rome, London, Padua - often in the central cathedral, boasted the highest of high technology dedicated to reliably telling all - believer and nonbeliever alike - what time it was as, each went about their daily tasks and toil. That's the legacy of why church bells still sound on land, and bells still often declare the communal passage of time on ships at sea.

A very coherent argument has been made that it was the ability to artificially construct from the abstract a commonly accepted recurrent rhythm that divided a day into hours, a work week into days, months into weeks, and years into months which enabled rural agrarian societies to grandually transform into more urbanized and organized industrial, commercial, wage-for-unit-of-labor societies. A common time clock, and use of common currency for currency based upon credit, emerged in roughly the same historical era. The landlord and the cash tenant, the lender and the borrower, the boss and the hourly employee wage slave, each had a deeply personal stake in being able to figure out exactly what time it was. How else to define what was fair, what was on time with how much accrued interest, or what contract debt was overdue?

"Yes you can buy time, share it on vacation, put it on a sheet at work, use it for making a bomb, or turn it into an uncritical magazine...... We are all on the clock, all the time, wherever we go...... And so it goes. Nero may have fiddled while Rome burned, but we've got him beat by a microprocessed mile."

Thanks for your thoughts, Randall Amster. Maybe what we're talking about is a process which commenced in Medieval Europe, in which human lives have interfaced with time technology for so many years that the machines have finally triumphed completely.

Bill from Saginaw

I wonder if it's illegal or unconstitutional for Congress to pass a law that's, well, unconstitutional. HB 347 SB 1794. And Obama has signed it into law.

http://thenewamerican.com/usnews/constitution/11043-congress-passes-bill-severely-curtailing-first-amendment-liberties

(comment deleted by author)

Our inabiity to even remotely understand the ends to which those things that our minds can conceive will be put along with the proclivity of the strong to oppress and take advantage of the weak goes a long way to explaining our sorry state.
The same gllobal positioning technology that allows those lost in the forest or at sea to be rescued also enables drones to destroy the lives of an entire wedding party in the hopes that this or that "terorist" will be expunged or to target MIRV warhesds to destroy entire cities at the command of whoever is playing God on that particular day that their use is "implemented".
The same Internet that allows some of us to share thoughtful messages or to shop in saftey also facilitates the marketing of vile porography, identity theft, and the targeting of those who for whatever reason have been deemed "undesirables" and
in need of spying upon by whomever is playing God that particular day for whatever reason.
"Progress" will continue because it will increase the capacity of the strong to oppress everyone else and those with the mercantile urge to make lots of money. As such, "progress" will lead to an ever accelerating downward spiral towards destruction and madness. The time when we need God the most is the time that we are least capable of believing that He even exists. How profoundly ironic.

"You Don’t Need a Clock to Know What Time [THIS] Is"

"...maybe everyone does [know], at least on some level, with a great many simply choosing to ignore the alarm bells in favor of the bells and whistles on their latest consumer gadget."

Very good rant, there, from Randall Amster. - Pointing out how self-deluded we are on what really matters to our survival. Now that we've become accustomed to denying climate extreming in order to continue "gadgeting", that habit of laxity of mind will kill a lot of US.

Meanwhile, back on the internet, attention cut-off and emotional over-indulgence on issues continue in a bewildering mix, unless we realize, each of us, that it's all about ourselves - not a far-off danger or a celebrity in distress.

We're being manipulated with comforts on incredibly deep and unfamiliar levels of constituting our selves, our identifications, our feelings of what it is to be "me". And the notion that someone sinister is in control, partly true as it is, is much more comfortable than the realization that NOBODY is in control of human culture anymore. ("Anymore", because in previous decades there always was somebody in control of the limited projects, however grand, that humans instigated - while now the projects have taken their own course, and the responsible for losing control are all pretending it wasn't them and nothing's happening).

We're like a group of children on a disintegrating raft after a capricious wave washed the adults overboard. And everybody thinks some of the older kids overview what's going on, while the older kids are busy finding out who can be exploited for their next meal.