To Be

A human being. Being human.
Not a human doing. Not a human thinking.
Being. To be.
The act of being.
Overlooked. Taken for granted.
Not recognized or appreciated in itself.
To be.
Being.
An awesome reality: to be.
A human being.
Being.
Awareness of being.
Paying attention to being.
Knowing that you are a human being.
Every instant.
Being.
Is everything.

Working for a Living

There are lucky people who have jobs that they
like. What are the percentages of people who
work to provide shelter, food, clothing for their
families and don't really want to do what they are
doing but do it any way? These are some kind
of selfless heroes in a way. They probably outnumber
the people who enjoy the work they do by a large
proportion.

Structured, controlled, worktime environnments
might some day be phased out and be replaced by
employees earning acceptance for self
responsibility and reliability. That seems to
be evolving already. The carrot and stick approach
as common incentives may be changing as serfdom
gradually changed. To see advancements and
developments in some employer/employee situations,
one probably will have to live a few more
hundred years.

Who won?

Is competition part of human nature? Is agression?
Are they connected? Does basic, primitive
competition for food or for mates from our ape
background carry over through thousands of years
of evolution and supposed sophistication? Is
competition built into the species and as viable
now as in the ancient past? Does competition
naturally extend into other areas? Or has
competition today become contrived as a
substitute for the basic food and mating urges?

Are competitive sports an extension of our inner
need to vie against others? Does attendance at
a team competition or even watching games on television
fill some primal instinct? Our team wins then we
win? Less stressfull than the ancient days of
clubbing a foe with an animal bone. Just cheer
and jump up and down in the living room.

Competition now exists in many areas: for
leadership and power within a group, for
accumulation of wealth, for domination and
control of others, for ego gratification, and...
for mates. Some economic systems are based on degrees
of competition believing that products created by
competition must be better products. Competition by
nations in business or for territory often lead to
disputes, sometimes to conflict resulting in war.
Historically wars are the ultimate form of competition
where losers die.

Do alpha male humans naturally compete against other
alpha males because it's in their ape heritage? Same
for alpha females. Syblings might compete their
entire childhoods for parental approval. Is it so
ingrained in human makeup that competition can not
be recognized and perhaps adjusted in some way?

Can competition be refined or altered into some other
way of doing things, or is the ape in us too dominant
to allow such a deviation? Must we continue to compete
for the biggest banana? Will competition always be a
part of the human makeup?

Not another war movie?

Over the past few decades, there's been
extensive analysis on the influence of
movie and tv violence on viewers,
particularly on children, but that's about
as far as it's gone, the analysis that is.
Violence continues seemingly as an integral
part of much of contemporary entertainment.
Seeing blood and bodies on tv has become normal.

The images of violence proved so commercially
successful that they were expanded into another
major entertainment form, video games. Hand
held video game murder in many creative forms
with bodies exploding or lying in puddles of blood
has been part of the gaming experience since
its beginning.

Gruesome images via games, tv, movies are by now
stamped into viewers minds. They are accepted.
Common. 'It's only entertainment,' is the plea
of creators and marketeers of violence
oriented movies, programs, games. 'It's what
people want', they say.

Viewers have generally become so used to images
of violence that reality and fiction can blend.
Actual images of the horrors of violent acts become
less shocking. Is that a suicide bomber? It's been
done. We've played that game. We've all seen that
movie. Where's the remote?

Days of future past

Remember the good old days? Not the time of
your childhoood, but the real old days:
the days before you were born? Remember
a few years before that? How about 100
years before you were born? Can you
recall anything from 1000 years ago? How
about 10,000 years ago? Or five million
years ago? Or a billion? Of course not.

You can't recall because you weren't existing
in those days. You simply were not alive. Those
distant good old days were all the same as far as
you were concerned, because there was no 'you'.

Well that's exactly what the future holds for us,
all of us: nothing. It's the same experience you
don't recall from before you were born, that
condition known as 'not being alive.' Pre-birth
and post-death are alike: no living. No being. No
nothing. Nada. Bupkus. Zip. Zilch. The void.

Post-living is nothing to be afraid of because
you already experienced the same nothingness
from forever until you were born. So it's just
a return to that when you take your last breath.
Living is just an interlude.

If you live 100 years or more that's just a blip of
time compared to the time you won't be living. So
you're almost always unborn or dead, in other words,
non-existent. Normal, in a sense, is to not exist.
Forever is the time we all spend not living, except
for now, this brief time existing on the stage of life.

Interesting, isn't it, to not be in that 'forever'
condition we left and will return to. Wondrous
to be alive as human beings with self awareness,
sensual perception, emotion, memory and curiosity,
reasoning and imagination. It seems logical to
want to maximize the experience of being human
for living is so relatively brief. How do we
do that? Probably by recognizing life for the
wonder it is, by paying attention, by being in
the moment, and being open to all of it. It's all
just floating by so grab it while it's here.

Chips for everyone

In the very near future, it's not unlikely that
all people will be required to have a micro
identity chip installed beneath the skin, maybe
in the neck or shoulder. Everyone, everywhere.
This chip will be embedded in babies as soon
as they are born, won't be visible but will
store and update pertinent information about
a person.

Government agencies will be able to scan chip
data from near or far, from a moving vehicle
or maybe even from long distances via satellites.
Each chip will be store details about a person
including nationality, ethnicity, age, height,
weight, address,employment, marital status,
education, skills,movement,health and anything
else that might be handy in maintaining a total
information package about anyone and everyone.

Only authorized pesonal using authorized devices
will be able to read the data on the chip. Data
would be shared by such agencies as police or
immigration or national security or census or health
or taxation or all agencies, always.

Today, i.d. chips are already used as markers
but mostly in pets. Many dogs and cats have chips
imbedded in them so they can be recovered if lost
or stolen. Some people actually have voluntarily
had i.d. chips placed under their skin. Some groups
advocate widespread use of i.d. chips for children or
old people. Possibly a government will expand on that
and eventually insist that i.d. chips will protect
citizens under the all purpose excuse of 'national
security', making intallation mandatory. No chip,
no records, no history, no identity. Cause for alarm.

'Are you allowed to be on this side of the street?
Your i.d. chip says you don't have proper authorization.
And another thing, your chip doesn't show proof of
'open reading' so you aren't authorized to read this
type of blog. For you, this is the end.'