I recently read an interesting article about wisdom. Some of its contents were interesting, anyway. The writer’s conclusion that wisdom is a mysterious, undefinable entity left me distinctly un-fascinated. This seems to me to be another manifestation of our short-sighted, youth driven “pop” culture, in which history and memory are eschewed in favor of current fashion.

     Here’s what I think wisdom is. You take what a person has absorbed over the course of her/his life, however long or short that might be. You cross-connect all that data. Now if this person is wise, he or she will be able to make correlations between their experiences, giving them a useful perspective on a situation.

     For instance: Joy Smith (fictional character) has lived through a number of Minnesota winters. She’s seen how a particular caterpillar acts in late fall. She’s noted that this caterpillar seemed to come down out of the apple trees earlier in September when there was going to be a snowy winter. Hence, she can postulate the amount of snow that she’ll see in the coming cold season.

     So, you add your experiences to the clarity of your perception, and your ability to see relationships between those facts and experiences; voila! You have wisdom. It’s not necessarily a function of age, since young people can make connections between their experiences, and older folks haven’t necessarily learned a great deal in their lives, and may not have the “horse sense” to put their experiences together. But the greater your body of experience, the more possible connections and correlations there are. This is simple math.

     In our modern society, where youth is prized over everything except wealth, wisdom is badly out of fashion. We see the manifestations of this everywhere; we’re racing around like maniacs, doing little more than ruining our environment and killing each other by accident and on purpose (always due to ignorance unless you want to believe that everyone is intentionally evil), we’re leaping before we look, we’re rushing to judgments that contradict generations of good experience. We’re building giant, complicated machines to do things that we figured out how to do most efficiently centuries ago! What are we thinking?

     Answer; we’re not. We’ve tossed aside our collective memories, our wisdom, our lore, in favor of instant gratification. Like impatient children, we refuse to see how all the yesterdays add up to make tomorrow. All the information is there, waiting to be stirred around into smart soup. One does not have to be ancient to see how crippled we are as a species when we won’t hear the voice of experience.

Perhaps what I’ve been spouting in this blog isn’t controversial enough. Perhaps I haven’t laced my commentaries with enough bile and finger-pointing. Maybe I’m just too Pollyanna-ish, and nobody wants to play my silly little game of looking for truth rather than lies. Maybe the pieces I’m writing are just so damned good that there’s no refuting what I’m saying, and there’s nothing to add. In any case, I’m feeling like I’m spouting into an ocean of ether. Standing on a podium in the middle of the Gobi desert, with not a soul in view.

While I do look in the mirror every once in a while, I’m not the kind of guy that goes begging for confirmation or affirmation. But I don’t cherish the notion that I’m spewing pointless crap into the atmosphere, either. When I post here at this blog, I’m hoping to stimulate positive conversations about who we are and what we’re doing. I’m presenting myself in hopes of seeing you!

I don’t want to be your prophet or messiah. I am not here to write extended Hallmark card greetings for you. The intent of this blog is to bring people together, shoulder to shoulder and heart to heart. That’s why it’s a blog; that’s why you can sign in and make comments, too!

Am I just being stupid to think we can have positive discussions, and grow from listening to each other with finding points of agreement and enlightenment as our goal? Do we have to butt heads to grow? Does there have to be a protagonist and an antagonist in every damned situation? If that is true, if we need enemies to motivate us, then we are a scourge on the planet and should go ahead and have the Big War.  Humanity grew out of cooperation. If we’ve become hardwired to need enemies, I think our branch of the evolutionary tree is cracking off and falling into oblivion. We’re done. Anybody want to fight about that?

           I don’t know if I qualify as a “Baby Boomer” or not; I was born in late 1960. I grew up in the midst of them, though, and I watched their actions and activities with great interest. I idolized the ones I knew; they were socially conscious, community oriented, and really “hip”. They tuned in, turned on, and dropped out. They started co-ops. They protested unfair practices by corporations and governments. They stood up for what they believed. And there were a whole bunch of them!

          Now, I look around and wonder where they all went. I see a whole bunch of people that seem to be about their age, but they behave nothing like the folks I grew up wanting to be like. They drive shiny new cars. They have IRAs. They are the very bedrock of consumerism, a practice that the “Boomers” I knew would have seen as wasteful and selfish. They seem to be living by the “Cheez-it” credo; “Get your own box!” They go to exclusive restaurants. They belong to exclusive clubs. They protest nothing but high taxes and the insolence of the younger generation, and you certainly don’t see them organizing socially conscious rallies or cooperative lifestyles. You’ll more likely find them living in the suburbs.

          Oh, you might hear them bemoaning global warming. You might even note that they claim to be for the “progressive” political party. But, like most Americans, they will most likely vote for the politician who they think is most likely to win. Everybody wants to be a “winner”.

          So what happened to those brave souls that were willing to risk bodily injury and incarceration to make their feelings about social injustice and war known? Where is the strength of spirit, the conviction, the heart? Is there no longer a heartfelt belief that peace and love are the ultimate answer? Do they believe that they have come to an acceptable compromise? Or did they just get tired? Or greedy?

          I find it interesting that the “Boomer” generation was the first to have such an incredible preponderance of lavish living offered to them. Before the 1950’s, people saw comfort very differently, and much more simply. Back then, even an indoor toilet was considered as a “convenience”, or a “luxury”. “Fast food” was unheard of, and most meals were actually cooked from “scratch”. So, did these “Boomers” just get so soft that they couldn’t even imagine an afternoon on the Capitol steps in the rain, waving peace signs and chanting slogans? Do they so fear the recriminations that such acts of conscience might bring? Or are they just very comfortable?

          The next time you are at a Rod Stewart concert (if you can come up with the 100+ dollars that you’ll need to see a concert these days), look around. I fear that you’ll see a lot of graying hair, complacency, and self-absorbed inertia. I wonder how so many of those motivated “radicals” of the 1960’s and 70’s managed to melt into such puddles of blubber and blindness. They had a good thing going; they were seeing real social change coming from their hard work. Now, we see the entire world slipping down into a nightmare of greed and domination, oppression and fascism. These are the social diseases they were fighting, and fighting successfully. It is so disheartening for me to see the “Boomers” as the “fat cats” now.

          Let’s face it; human beings are addicted to crisis. When there are no earthquakes shaking the foundations of our houses, no hurricanes whipping off our roofs, no imminent attack on our shores by evil monsters in human disguise, we just invent a crisis to keep the monkey fed. We seem to need the sort of stress that ends up clogging our hearts and clouding our minds.

           I think that this odd behavior has its roots in our not-so-distant past, when daily life was a bit more exciting. I believe that we are hard-wired to live i n difficult circumstances. My speculation is that this genetic coding has its origins in pre-neolithic times. We had an ice age to contend with, and no forced-draft furnaces. We had saber-tooth tigers and mammoths, and no Howitzers or hand grenades. We had tooth-and-nail physical combat with competing tribes for territory. Life was one big adventure; always exciting, often fatal.

         Things are a bit different now. We don’t have to worry about letting the fire go out. There’s no rabid, starving pack of wolves at the mouth of our cave. Our next meal is minutes or perhaps seconds away, ready to heat or awaiting us at the nearby drive-up window. Our sheets are probably pretty fresh on the cushy mattress, so there’s no need to go gathering leaves, moss, grass, animal hides…..

          So what’s all the fuss? The big panic is whether we’ve got the right colored shirt, or driving in traffic, or being at work at exactly eight o’clock. We see enemies behind every philosophy and religion, every skin color and tradition. It is absolutely imperative that our food is cooked in just the right way. We declare war on weeds, on bugs, on the very bacteria that we depend on in our symbiosis to keep us healthy and digest our pre-packaged food. We’ve even gone so far as to declare war on fear! Truly, we have a real love affair with crisis and stress.

          All the really dangerous things have disappeared from our daily lives. Interestingly, in our addiction to all these petty crises, we somehow manage to be so myopic as to miss the greater perils. In following our fears into defensive and selfish postures, we’ve been in mortal combat with our planet (which never had any intentions of being our enemy) and our brother and sister humans. We’ve been waging an unnecessary war of attrition on the very entities that sustain us. In our frenetic need for stress, we have most certainly generated a much more terrible crisis than we ever imagined.

          So how can we focus our irrational, outmoded need for daily crisis on this impending disaster? How can we be so silly as to have the capacity to see the stars and the atoms, and not see what is staring us right in the face; our own terrible stench?

     Okay, so where are you? I know, it’s a silly question. You’re right here! But where, exactly, is “here”? What do you know about it? I’d be willing to bet you could learn a few things. It wouldn’t kill you…..

     It’s really easy to take “here” for granted. It’s also really easy to treat it as though you’re just passing through, but you’re not. Everywhere you go bears a lasting impression of you. You are an agent of change in every “here” you occupy, no matter how brief you think your stay is. And every “here” leaves a lifelong imprint on you, whether you choose to recognize it or not.

     Everywhere you’ve ever been and everywhere you’ll ever go is a complete cosmos in and of itself. No matter how drab or tired it looks to you, there is an infinity of information to be gleaned. Obviously, you’re not going to get it all. But you might be surprised at how much flows in when you don’t even realize it. I believe that everyone’s subconscious has an eidetic memory; everything it perceives gets stored away in the basement of your personal library. Some of this comes up into the conscious as intuition and inspiration. Some reveals itself in dreams. Some of it just stays at the bottom of the pile.

     I believe that your “here” stretches out before and behind you as far as you have come and as far as you will go. Everything you’ve ever done and everything you will ever do is part of your “here”. It really pays to know where you are, because you can relate that information to decisions you must make now. By opening your perceptions to what goes on around you, and caring about your impact and your impressibility, you can apply all the information of your today and your yesterdays to optimizing your “here”. If you pee in this pool, you will swim in pee.

     There are so many excuses for not paying attention to what’s going on around you. You might think that acknowledging something in your presence makes you responsible for it. Sorry bub; whether you admit it’s here or not, it’s here. So take responsibility.

     It might be the bogeyman in the closet or the elephant in the room, and you’re scared to look at it. The fact that you choose not to see it doesn’t lessen its impact on you, it just gives you less control over the outcome. So take a good look.

      You might say you’re in a big hurry. Where are you going so fast? No matter what, you’ll still be “here”. Stop and take a look around! If you don’t orient yourself, you don’t go anywhere that you need to go. You’ll just be lost, right in the middle of the place you’ve always been. And if you don’t take the time to get to know that place, it will always be nowhere for you.

      The place you are feeds you, and you feed it. Think about it; would you close your eyes and start stuffing odd things into your mouth? Do you run blindly down dark halls? If you hear a train coming, do you stop your car on the tracks?

     It is worth paying close attention to what’s going on around you, and committing events and entities to memory. You can put those memories into current context. It can serve as a sort of “operators manual” for your daily life. Your mind will get better and better at plotting trends and intuiting events as you have more information to feed it. And you’ll get to know your self much better, too, as you realize how you interact in all the “heres” of your life.

     Get to know your “here”. It’s always going to be with you, no matter where you go.

     I have this crazy idea. I know it’s terribly far fetched, but I’m just so crazy about it that I have to tell you. I think that if each and every one of us so-called rational humans would admit the inescapable fact that we’re not the fountain of absolute truth, the epitome of morality, and the be-all and the end-all of prudence and honor, we might be able to open our ears, eyes, hearts, and minds to the other fifty gazillion inhabitants of our little planet. If there was just the seed of a chance that another person or creature might have some useful information for us, or a really cool way of doing something, we would be able to set aside our loutish, clownish pride and learn something.

     Because, really, we tend to look pretty idiotic when we insist on being “right”. What kind of a limited worldview could back up such a comical stance? The view from my eyes is pretty clear and nice, but it’s so far from all-encompassing that to even call my suppositions guesses would be a bit pompous. As the inimitable Yogi Berra once said after being asked what he knew about some trifling detail, “Know anything? Hell, I don’t even suspect anything!” That’s probably a clumsy paraphrasing of what he said, but I love the saying.

     Yes, I’m talking about humility. I don’t know why that’s such a tough place to stand, but humans have real trouble with it. And it would seem to be one of the few things that could bring about our downfall as a species.

     Did you ever notice how little you hear when you’re talking? We sure love the sound of our own voices, and I’ll be the first to admit that I fit the description, but the time spent listening is the time when you make real gains to your understanding.

     We’ve all heard that there’s more than one way to skin a cat. What makes us think that the way we’re doing it is anywhere close to being the best? What kind of an idiot would close their mind to the possibility that there’s a better way than the one he knows? When I look at it that way, I see how often I play the fool. Those hubris circuits just slam shut like big iron doors a few times every day. What the heck am I afraid of? That I might learn something?

     Our success as a species has been due mostly to our ability to co-operate, not our propensity for competition. We do better when we put our heads together. We excel when we can put together a variety of viewpoints. And what have we got to lose by cooperation? Pride? Holy mackerel, isn’t that the stupidest emotion? Look around at what we humans have done to our environment; do we have cause for pride anyway?

     Time to wise up and get small.

     I was reading the New York Times online this morning. The front page headline was “Death Knell May Be Near for Public Election Funds”. It seems that most of the upper tier 2008 presidential candidates will be opting out of the public funding pool, as it will only provide each applicant with $150,000,000.00 in campaigning money. Yes, one hundred and fifty million dollars. Hillary Clinton doesn't think it will be enough, so she's going begging in the public domain for more. John McCain is out collecting public money. Mitt Romney will forgo public financing. Barack Obama has declined to comment on his campaign finance options at this point.

     The article suggests that the two major party candidates competing for the United States Presidency on election day will each have raised and spent about half a billion dollars on campaigning. When all is said and done, there will have been at least a couple billion dollars raised and spent in the interest of slandering and libeling the presidential competition. This is what's being called democracy in the United States of America.

     Where does all this money come from? Who's got that kind of dough to throw around? In 2004, about 122.3 million people showed up at the polls, ostensibly to choose their new president. If every single one of those voters kicked down $18.00 for their candidate's coffers there would be enough, but I don't think that's where most of the dough is coming from. I think it's coming from large special interest groups, like corporations. Large business interests that want a say in the way they're governed, and are willing to slap down a fat wad to insure that they have it.

     The big name candidates, both Democrats and Republicans, have already realized that they are a commodity, and would rather not be beholden to the public's best interest, since the public is not wealthy enough or interested enough to own their politicians. They'll make their real campaign promises to the largest contributors. And since U.S. citizens are apparently a fairly complacent lot, they seem perfectly willing to go on about their business, unconcerned that some small percentage of the population owns the government, and by proxy, therefore owns them. The “market economy” can't stop at goods and services, it must also trade in power over YOU.

     So if you believe in the current system of governance in our fine country, I hope that you're putting a check mark in that tax return dedicating your $3 to public campaign financing, and that you've sent a letter or two to the appropriate agencies declaring your willingness to put a nice pile of cash into publicly financed campaigning. It's a free market election, and the presidency will go to the highest bidder. I think it's a waste of time and money, but if you think democracy in these trappings has a chance of really representing you, it's time to ante up. You'd better get a bunch of friends on board with you, though. Your wallet is in for some stiff competition; every single dollar out there now has the right to vote.

Firstly, let me say that I do believe in recycling. There is a time and place for melting something down and making it into something new. But it seems to me that the more effective route to go in most cases is to find a way to use the things in their current form. And making things in long-term usable form makes the most sense. For instance: aluminum beverage containers. Plastic ones, too. THIS IS A TRAVESTY! Hey, we all know how to handle glass bottles. And, if they are made well, they can be used over and over again. All you have to do is wash them out!

The same holds true for tin cans. Put the darned tomatos in Mason jars! And the pineapple, and the green beans, et cetera ad infinitum. People can use those jars for so many things around the house. And, just like us old fogeys remember from childhood, there could be a deposit on glass bottles and jars. Plus, it’s a lot easier to melt down glass for recycling than almost any metal. And we don’t want to put our food in lead cans, now do we?

Then there are all these new cars being built. You know, some of them even claim to be energy efficient. But did they take into account the emissions and destruction generated by the manufacturing process? I’m guessing that there’s a nice pile of pollution produced for each new car that rolls off the assembly line. And what happens to the old car you got rid of? Maybe, just maybe, if you chose well with your last auto purchase, you’re getting halfway decent gas mileage. Drive it until it’s no longer viable as a vehicle. Maintain it carefully, and I’ll bet you will be responsible for less overall pollution than you will cause by having a new vehicle built for you.

There are so many ways to reuse rather than recycle. Cloth shopping bags. Crumpled junk mail for shipping packages rather than styro peanuts. Put leftovers in jars. My gosh, the list is endless! And if we demand more reusable products, the manufacturing companies will have no choice but to provide us with them.

So by all means, recycle it when it’s darn good and worn out. But, until then, REUSE IT!