Lord, I tried to avoid the news today, but I failed. It is a continuing shortcoming in my moral constitution. Lord, I try, I’ve tried, I shall try. But the temptation has driven me to an addiction. In my defense, I plead unavoidable immersion. How can I avoid the news short of living in a cave. Even when I turn off my car radio, the TV, and the computer, I still hear the news. People talk, you know, in the grocery store, at the gas station, in the bar or restaurant, on the bus, and in the street. And what about those newspaper dispensers with the front page above the fold standing on every street corner? Should I wear blinders and those silencing headpieces that jackhammer operators wear?
 
Lord, I pray for the end of news because it’s always bad news. All right, not always bad. There’s always that smiling anchor who says, “…that was Gary So-n-So, reporting on the tragedy. In other news, a puppy that was lost miraculously returned to its owner today. That story next….”
So, I guess I should listen to the puppy stories. What psychological harm can they do?
 
Six of one and a half dozen of the other, as they say. If I listen only to the puppy stories, I risk not knowing the evil out there, the people, events, and actions that might negatively affect me. I’m just trying to be prepared, Lord. That’s okay, isn’t it? I think You want me to take care of myself, so knowing what’s going on is moral. Right?
 
Lord, I know. I’m justifying. I’m like every other addict. “What can it hurt?” I ask myself when I see the news. And then, even when I leave the room with the TV to get a cup of tea, I still hear those voices rambling on, and on, and on. Lord, please make it stop. It doesn’t stop. It comes from everywhere. It’s like the Cosmic Microwave Background, born with the beginnings of consciousness and permeating every corner of the Humanverse. It’s not my fault, is it? There was news before I was born. You were there at the beginning. Couldn’t You have done something to stop it, like not creating the possibility for news? Did You make news possible just to test me? To test all of us?  
 
Is the news the reason for all religion? Did people long ago plead with You to make it stop? Is that why so many religions make peace their primary prayer? Certainly, there’s little peace to be found in the news. Is that request in Your prayer about delivering us from evil a mistranslation. Are the actual words, “deliver us from news”? How else will we live peacefully? Please help. I’ve tried, Lord, but there it is, everywhere I look, and when others suggest rehab, I do what all addicts do; I hide a newspaper, a TV, or radio in the drawer, in the closet, under the bed, behind the bush, anywhere, so that when others aren’t around, I say, “Well, just one story. What can it hurt? I’ll stop after this.”
 
Oh! The frailty, the weakness, the obsession. I can’t do this alone, Lord. Please help me. Have mercy. Please shut off the damnable news! Amen. Or, as the news anchor suggests, should I say “Amen and Awomen”?

We love our gadgets, don’t we? And when a new one comes along we acquire if we can. Of course, some new tech is pricey, so personal economics limits acquisition. But one thing’s for sure, new tech doesn’t elicit much opinion-sharing among the general public unless it concerns health. Lots of talk about vaccines and biotech these days. Lots of opinions. 
 
Then there’s this science stuff; it does draw opinion, particularly earth science, even more specifically, dare I say it, climate science. And now we know world opinion about climate change:
 
81% of the people in England and Italy think it’s an emergency
79% of the people in Japan think likewise
75% of Canadians are in the picture, also; pass the Molson, it’s hot outside
The Tunisians, Swedes, and Egyptians buy into climate emergency by 2/3 their populations
 
What? Where’s this coming from? Why, it’s the result of the Peoples’ Climate Vote, “the world’s biggest ever survey of public opinion on climate change” covering 50 countries with 500,000 teenagers among the respondents.  *
 
That settles it. Climate is an emergency because opinion says it is. The world has voted! Whew! The survey comes just in time for the next climate conference, the UN Climate Summit scheduled for Glasgow in November. Now we know that climate change is a global emergency. People say it is. Lots of people. They voted. Consensus. Verified. Done. No more discussion. Opinion settled.
 
One science is almost as dead as phrenology. Can you guess which one?
 
Notes:
*United Nations Development Programme. 27 Jan. 2021. World’s largest opinion survey on climate change: Majority call for wide-ranging action. Phys.Org. Online at  https://phys.org/news/2021-01-world-largest-opinion-survey-climate.html   Accessed January 27, 2021.
 
AND NOW THE SOMEWHAT LENGTHY COMMENT: First off, I don’t doubt the validity of the UN’s findings. They appear valid though skewed toward younger participants. It was, after all, a survey administered through Angry Birds. That venue alone tells you that we need to take it seriously. Don’t want angry birds sitting on the wires over my car raining their droppings. But second, one question not covered by the survey, which asked about conserving forests, using wind and solar power, making farming more climate-friendly and business greener, was this: “On what data do you base your opinion?” But, hey, this is an opinion survey administered, I repeat, through a gaming network. And as young Americans (and many older ones, too) often say, “It’s my opinion, and my opinion is as good as yours because, well, it’s my opinion.  And that’s my opinion.”
 
And look at what was asked over gaming network of Angry Birds. Essentially, one of the choices was between clean and dirty waterways and oceans; another, between warning people about or not telling them of coming disasters like eruptions and hurricanes; yet another was between wasting and not wasting food. What’s the word I’m looking for here? Oh! Yeah. “Duh.”
 
Who in the surveyed group would be for wasting food even though many in that group probably waste their share of food? Heck, if she were alive, my mother would be saying to all the Angry Birds gamers, “Finish your supper.” Or, in a common, but ineffective parental motivational trick back in the fifties, “There are children in China who are starving,” as though local consumption of food would somehow lessen the hunger pangs of distant anonymous Chinese children. And with regard to other questions in the survey, who could be against forests? Poor trees, standing defenseless against the chainsaws, unable as they are to run away and hide in some elfin land with waterfalls supplied by endless and pure springs. Excuse me if I think this largest-ever survey by the UN was conducted in a desire for a world of bunnies, flowers, and eternal sunshine mixed with the gentlest of rains on the side of picturesque volcanoes that never erupt with incinerating pyroclastic flows.  
 
We might be living in a time when fantasy overrides all, when sociologists become the arbiters of the so-called hard sciences. The UN survey was, after all, conducted through gaming networks under the direction of sociologists. As I wrote above, the findings seem to be valid; they do detail and summarize opinion. But what do they have to do with gathering and explaining actual climate data? Or with questioning the validity of models that have yet to be validated by disasters out of the ordinary, disasters different from those that struck the Pueblo, the Maya, the Romans? What does the survey tell me other than that Angry Birds gamers in general have been convinced there’s a climate emergency. SAVE THE POLAR BEARS!  
 
Yes, humans have altered the planet on a scale they never before accomplished. Atmospheric carbon dioxide has increased since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. But a species that has been in the planet-changing business for a mere 250,000 years is a drop in the climate bucket on a planet 4.5 billion years old. That climate should be stable for more than 200,000 years for a species with our ubiquitous geographical range is a myth. Look back to the vicissitudes of climate over just the past 2,000 years to see droughts that persisted for decades or even centuries before the rains returned. Look at the effects of Earth’s wobble and its orbital shape. Look—not literally—at sunspot activity, volcanic eruptions that disrupted “normal” weather.  
 
I know. I know. You think I’m one of those crazy “climate deniers”—a strange term, since it should be “climate change denier.” I’m not. Climates change, and maybe not for the worse. Doesn’t it all depend on where one lives and how one survives? At 1040 feet above sea level, I’m not going to be inundated by rising seas. I choose not to live on flat land beside the ocean. In that I’m not like the two last Presidents, both of who have homes on the beach—ironically, or strangely, one of them saying the seas were rising.
In the last 250 years, a mere one thousandth of human history has passed, and we know that we’ve altered the composition of the atmosphere, not to our advantage. That seems undeniable to me. Look what we did to the ozone with chlorofluorocarbons. But look, also, to our having decreased the threat to the ozone layer. Now is that the same as what we have done to the carbon content of the atmosphere? Apples and oranges, you know.
 
We didn’t need CFCs to run a civilization. We did and still do need fossil fuels. California has demonstrated that it can’t supply its electrical grid with green energy. It might be possible, but it will take time, lots of time. In the interim, people who want fruit from Florida and California, olive oil from the Mediterranean countries, and rare earths for tech batteries will still depend on massive transportation networks built on fossil fuels. Trains don’t run to your neighborhood market, but trucks do. We can’t get past the needs imposed by our ubiquitous range. We live everywhere we can live, and we visit places we can’t live for science, resources, adventure, and leisure activities.
 
So, what are we to do with the largest ever survey on climate? What are we to do with all those opinions? Eighty-one percent of the British and high percentages of other people think “climate” is an emergency—if the Angry Birds survey by the UN is as valid as it appears to be.

Should we make policy based on opinion?
 
Are we locked in a snowball in an avalanche? As those 81% influence others, the percentage will grow. Maybe someday, 100% will say “climate” is an emergency. In the meantime, some sociologist needs to do a follow up study to see how the 81% put their beliefs into action. How many gamers will turn off their energy-consuming games as they opt for old fashioned chess, or checkers, or the almost interminable Monopoly game when no one lands on Boardwalk and Park Place? There's no electricity involved in those games unless they’re played at night.
 
Sorry for the long comment. I wait in breathless anticipation for the Glasgow Conference and the proclamations that the world believes “climate” is an emergency. This is what we’ve come to: The United Nations, the supposed best humanity has to offer in its 250,000 years, has spent time and money to produce an opinion survey. And for what? To demonstrate that even great minds look for emotional confirmation? If climate science isn’t dead, it’s in its death throes as opinion confirms belief.
 
But I can’t leave without making one more comment. Probably every one of us is at least a little guilty of hypocrisy. I know I am. I confess. You got me. But today, January 27, 2021, as I rode in my truck, I heard a press conference emanating from the White House Press Room. An administration official who fought to keep windmills from New England’s waters because they would spoil the great sailing in his “backyard,” said we need wind power. Say what? He’s against windmills where he can see them, but he wants to put them up where he can’t see them, but where you can. Do as I say and ignore that I don’t do what I say. And when all those “climate” scientists fly into Glasgow in November to drink expensive liquor and motor around Scotland in their off hours, will any of them feel even the slightest bit of guilt about their carbon footprints? I don't need an answer to confirm what I already know.

Seems almost everyone has thin skin nowadays, but thin skin stretches back centuries, if not to human origins. Members of our species easily take offense because personal identity and sense of worth lie encapsulated by an easily scratched and cut psychological epidermis.
 
Of course, not all personalities are thin-skinned. But how does one tell the difference in skin thickness? For centuries, the only test for psychological skin was the pinprick of sharp comment across a backyard fence or village common. With the rise of civilizations, we have added more tests: Printed words at first, then broadcast ones, and now the wars on social media. These more recent tests are verbal scalpels that make deep cuts through any thin skin.
 
Some people, however, bear nary a scratch from the verbal thorns as they walk through the briars of gossip and hearsay. They have formed elephantine layers of emotional protection. There’s no way to tell just by looking who has thick and who has thin skin, however; the impoverished svelte might be thick-skinned and the affluent Rubenesque, thin-skinned. And neither relative fame nor relative obscurity serves as a distinguishing characteristic of skin thickness though the former typically sends its bearer along a route with more jaggers.
 
Today the balms and bandages for psychological cuts lie as much in the hands of judges as in the hands of village healers, sympathetic listeners, or psychological counselors. In a litigious society, the threat of a civil suit provides an extra protective layer that wards off the cutting edges of libel and slander. The prospect of litigation is the reason that at the end of old-time radio programs, TV shows, and films the audience might hear or read the well-known disclaimer that all persons portrayed are fictitious. The advisable statement disavows any seeming connection between the fictional characters and “real” people. The disclaimer serves to protect the artist from a thin-skinned subject.
 
Of course, in any society the fashion of the day makes portrayal of the cultural minority more susceptible to those thorny portrayals, as evidenced by the current “late night” network comedians who apparently choose to jab at the skin of conservatives rather than scratch the skin of liberals. But given the pendulum swings of culture, one needs only look back to those comedians of the mid-twentieth century who were more inclined to throw darts into the other skin. Then, as now, those in power stab those out of power and with the backing of a condoning culture feel no need for disclaimers in their direct attacks. For any with thin skin, each milieu determines who must dodge the stabbing criticism, libel, and slander. And in the current milieu few would understand how skin thickness affected previous generations or will affect future generations.
 
Those who have used disclaimers over the past 100 years as protection against legal action by the offended are not the first to do so. Alphonse Daudet published The Nabob in 1898. In the 1902 English translation of the book by George Burnham Ives, the publisher inserts this “Note to the French Edition,” a disclaimer that reads:
 
     “We have been informed that at the time of the publication of The Nabob in serial form, the government of Tunis was offended at the introduction therein of individuals whom the author dressed in names and costumes peculiar to that country. We are authorized by M. Alphonse Daudet to declare that those scenes in the book which relate to Tunis are entirely imaginary, and that he never intended to introduce any of the functionaries of that state.” *
 
What can anyone say here, but “Wink, Wink”? The publisher thought a disclaimer was necessary to protect author, translator, and publisher. They weren’t, however, the first to worry about scratching thin skins. Others, notably eighteenth-century picaresque author Alain-René Lesage, felt a similar need.
 
Daudet himself begins The Nabob by quoting from Lesage’s beginning of Gil Blas: “As there are persons who cannot read a book without making personal application of the vicious or absurd characters they find therein, I hereby declare for the benefit of such evil-minded readers that they will err in making such application of the portraits in this book. I make public avowal that my only aim has been to represent the life of mankind as it is."
 
Now, you might wonder about the fuss here. For starters, consider that we live in an Age of Nabobs, the nouveau riche of our times acquiring vast wealth at a pace far exceeding that of previous eras. The term nabob became part of the English language as Brits who had served in India returned to England with great wealth. Eager to enter a society peopled by nobility, the nabobs were eventually portrayed as buffoons of faux pas by dramatists and novelists. But wealth breeds power if not actual respect. Today’s nabobs wield those scalpels that cut their opponents deeply. The need for thick skin is real because the ultra nouveau riche control who stabs and who gets stabbed through various media platforms.
 
You might remember from history that Spiro Agnew once used the term “nattering nabobs of negativism” to refer to the press. The term was coined by late Nixonian speech writer   
William Safire who used it to impugn the Press. The alliterative expression became instantly famous, even though, in truth, members of the press did not specifically fall into the class of nouveau riche. But today, the term might be more appropriate, for the Press has risen to a state of inordinate wealth, that is, if we count social media as part of the Press. Instant billionaires now control who can pierce the skin of personal identity and whose skin is protected by a layer of artificial and biased covering.
 
The thin-skinned have fallen as a million cuts have turned skin gangrenous. That is not a new development, but the scale, the numbers of people affected, has grown exponentially. At this time few of those favored by the Nabobs of the Net bother with an “all persons fictitious” disclaimer, so emboldened are these new nattering nabobs of negativism. The power of the nouveau riche has spread to the population in general—as long as that population sides with the cultural rulers. Access to social media makes anyone on the planet a media nabob who can intrude into any social class if the ruling nabobs allow.   
 
History is replete with stories of psychological skin piercing. No doubt the lost writings of the ancients contained many barbs because some of the surviving texts include cutting words little different from those of today, their writers motivated by the same kinds of emotions and beliefs revealed in our various media. That cutting words have long been a problem is evidenced by Levitcus 19:16 in a line that reads “Do not go about spreading slander among your people.” St. Paul also notes the problem in. Second Timothy 3:3 when he writes, "They will be unloving and unforgiving; they will slander others and have no self-control. They will be cruel and hate what is good." One had to have thick skin in biblical times. And in medieval times with writers like Dante, who had no trouble criticizing and placing even Church leaders like Nicolas III, Boniface VIII, and Clement V among those who should suffer in Hell. And, of course, in modern times with millions of sharp-tongued critics who write on social media.  
 
With the rise of realism in art and literature came the rise of “true stories” that abound now and TV’s popular reality shows, in which little is held back. Unlike those who wrote disclaimers for the old Dragnet TV series and other shows, disclaimers that professed, “the names have been changed to protect the innocent,” those who write the “true stories” of today have little regard for the “innocent.” Even the innocent, or especially the innocent, need thick skin. But there’s no need for the protected class to worry—at least not until the cultural pendulum swings again. Fortunately, the cultural pendulum does swing, and like that famous sharp blade in Edgar Allen Poe’s story of the Inquisition, doesn’t always slice the skin of intended victims. Sometime—we don’t know when—a deus ex machina will alter circumstances, fortunes will reverse, the persecuted will become persecutors, and different skins will be jeopardized by cutting tongues. What fortune the nouveau riche nabobs now enjoy will eventually reverse. Croesus is no longer rich, and Goebbels no longer controls the media.
 
But no one should take comfort in the eventual reversal of fortune, because the cutting pendulum continues to swing. No one can assure himself or herself that bruises, scrapes, nicks, and cuts won’t occur, that the skin will be unbroken, or that others will cease trying to stab or slice.
 
Having skin is necessary. On a cellular level, it’s the membrane. Organic molecules could not have become life until they were encapsulated in a protective covering. Protection by a layer of thick skin has always fostered survival, has allowed life to continue. Thick-skinned elephants do well in rough brush.
 
Understanding that those who slash usually do so under their own protective layer of cultural nabobs doesn’t prevent the cutting, but it does protect personal identity and self-worth. Elephantine skin might not seem as attractive as sylphic skin, but it serves a purpose. It isn’t only beauty that is “skin deep.” Personal identity and self-worth lie just below the surface.
 
How thick is your skin?
  
 
*Daudet, Alphonse. The Nabob in two volumes. Trans. George Burnham Ives. Boston, Little, Brown, and Company. 1898; University Press: John Wilson and Son, Cambridge, U.S.A. Vol. 1. Published online by Project Gutenberg at https://www.gutenberg.org/files/20646/20646-h/20646-h.htm  Accessed January 26, 2021.

​Was I some reincarnation of Tiresias, Cassandra, the Oracle at Delphi, Nostradamus, Caesar's soothsayer? This is a blog from 6/20/2015 entitled "It’s All Doom and Gloom."

 
Dear You,

The people are restless. A change in the climate seems to be stirring anger throughout the land. Now diseases previously unknown on a scale not previously experienced by international populations seem to be running amok among people weakened by famine. Everyone seems to be coughing from one disease or another. It’s all doom and gloom. We have to find a cause, and barring that, we have to name a scapegoat. We’re on the verge of a widespread disaster with spring weather unfavorable to the growth of crops. Millions will apparently die from starvation, and crimes and cruelty seem to be proliferating at an alarming rate. There are even stories of cannibalism among those who have little or no food.

After a period of climatic warming we’ve come to call the Warm Period, the weather of this year has turned a bit foul. Gone are the wonderful decades of growth and prosperity we’ve known during the past two centuries. Spring rains continue into the summer, and temperatures are definitely cooler on average than those merry times of growth and prosperity. How did this happen? Why did it happen? Are we being punished? I even heard that King Edward II of England could not find food when he stopped at St. Albans in August. It seems as though all of northern Europe is affected, and the conditions are especially hard on the peasantry.

Is there no relief from these worsening environmental conditions of 1315? Will they last for years? When will warmth and favorable precipitation rates return? We can’t grow wheat this year; the crops rot in the fields. We’ve turned to eating the seeds, and that means we don’t have the seeds to plant for next year.

It’s all doom and gloom. Humans might not last to the end of the fourteenth century. What else could happen to us? A plague?

Hoping that you and yours can survive these conditions,

Me 

​At My Own Dawn
 
At my own dawn, others were in the midst of their day, and some were at the end of theirs. No, I’m not referring to those periods of light and dark, nor to those 15 degrees of longitude by which we determine the hours and track of the Sun’s apparent journey across the dome of sky. Rather, I’m thinking about the dawn of my life, occurring as it did in the midst of a world war. While I transitioned from unaware to semi-self-aware being, others were fully aware of their ending, some 50 million in the process of dying because of three men, one in Germany, one in Italy, and one in Japan, their evil spreading suffering like a swarm of locusts across a parched Earth. And you? Your dawn also coincided with either big or small war and undeniably synchronously with suffering no matter what your year of birth.  
 
I think now, as I have thought before, that no better set of lines than those of W. H. Auden’s “Musée des Beaux Arts” captures the odd nature of simultaneous indifference and concern that permeates our species, and no better image does the same than that attributed to Pieter Bruegel the Elder, the famous Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, the inspiration for Auden and for two other poets of note, plus film makers and novelists.* Auden’s work gets directly to the point: “The old Masters: how well they understood/Its human position: how it takes place/While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along….” What is the “it”? Suffering, of course. And there I was, an infant indifferent to the world beyond my mother’s arms, unaware that around the globe there were those displaced, injured, and killed in war, a major battle occurring between the Germans and Russians on the very day of my birth, for example, and others from many countries wounded and dying on other battlefields. Their suffering meant nothing to me because I was unaware.
 
In Bruegel’s painting, Icarus falls to the sea while a farmer tills the ground, as Auden writes, probably unaware of the fall until he hears a splash behind him, maybe catching a glimpse of legs as the boy enters the sea. And as people on a nearby ship look, they see “Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky.” A curious spectacle that elicits no empathy. Life goes on for one and many just at the moment it ends for another and others.  
 
When I’m in the truck running some errand, I frequently tune to the satellite station that carries old radio programs. At the beginning or end of each program, the announcer, Greg Bell, notes the year of the production, many such years occurring during WWII. In an era before TVs invaded American homes and people listened in the evenings to radio shows, there were those during the war who starred as comedians, vocalists, and actors, all in the business of entertaining the radio audience who ate, opened windows, or walked dully along, as Auden writes. For them life went on more or less normally, if such a “normal” life is possible, while others of their age suffered the misfortunes of war.
 
And, of course, nothing has changed in that regard, even in a time of twenty-first century pandemics like H1N1 and COVID-19 and the numerous hot and cold wars that nations and factions within nations continue to fight. The world is largely composed of Bruegel’s farmers who of necessity tend their gardens and have little time to spend looking at people falling from the sky. But can we blame them? Can we blame ourselves for not paying attention? Our world has more than seven billion people spread over nearly 150 million square kilometers of land: That’s just too many people and too big a geography for specific concerns. So, any of us could argue that caring for, paying attention to, or empathizing with the many who suffer is just an impossible task. We are, after all, finite beings, not ubiquitous gods. Many an Icarus will fall without our knowing, and in most instances, even when we see the fall, we’ll not be able to do anything to stop the plummeting.
 
What good is a discussion about uncared for suffering? Is it just to depress, to sadden? No, rather it’s a call to care when you discover the need for it and not to take your empathy’s limitations as a failure. You and I will always be unaware of individual sufferers in distant lands, but for those close by, people adjacent to the land we till, just by lifting our heads from our tilling, that is, from our daily concerns, we might become aware and be able to help.
 
Icarus fell. Many Icaruses fall all the time. There’s a rain of Icaruses, and as in all precipitation events, we can’t stop all the drops that fall. We can’t comprehend the deaths of half of Europe during the pandemic of the fourteenth century, the deaths of millions during WWI or II, or the democides perpetrated by Communist dictators in the Soviet Union or in China. We can, however, intercept a few raindrops, a few Icaruses, on their way down, possibly softening their landing before they disappear beneath the surf.
 
As you sit with laptop or friends at some favorite coffee shop’s outdoor tables take a moment to look to the sky. Is there a falling Icarus?

Notes:
*William Carlos Williams,  Michael Hamburger, Nicholas Roeg, Eric Steele, Frank Ceruzzi, and in music, the band Titus Andronicus and composer Brian Ferneyhough. There is some question that Bruegel might not be the actual artist of the well-known painting, but rather the painter of a lost original that another Flemish painter copied in his style or used as inspiration.
 
 
 
Musee des Beaux Arts 
W. H. Auden 
About suffering they were never wrong,
The old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position: how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.
In Breughel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water, and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

Never mind the exact poetic lines Socrates addressed in this passage from Plato’s The Republic; consider, instead, the core of Socrates’ statement. 
 
            “We shall ask Homer and the other poets not to be angry if we delete these and all similar passages. They are poetic and pleasing to the majority of hearers, but the more poetic they are the less they should be heard by children and by men who must be free and fear slavery more than death. Most certainly” (57). *
 
So, simply said, seems Socrates censors some. 
 
Are you surprised? One might think that censorship of any kind would be anathema to a philosopher, especially and ironically to one who ended his life as a censored voice condemned to death. Ah! Censorship. It can be both boon and bane, boon when it’s applied to others and bane when it’s applied to the censor.
 
Now consider the conclusions from a study published in PLOS ONE online by Hilke Brockmann, Wiebke Drews, and John Torpey. In “A class for itself? On the worldwide of the new tech elite” the authors define that “class” as a group of “middle-aged men from an economic superpower. Of the top 100, fully 94 are men…Their average age is 54…Half are Americans…The superstars of tech also share similar educational backgrounds….” ** Among three hypotheses that the researchers test in their study is this:
 
            “The members of the tech elite have a contradictory relationship to democracy: they support democratic practices in general but undermine democracy by virtue of the political activities available to them on the basis of their tremendous wealth and influence.” Those “political activities” include censoring the non-elites with different political views.
 
So, simply said, Silicon censors selfishly.
 
Apparently, according to Brockmann et al., “members of the tech elite frequently fail to understand how their activities unavoidably (if inadvertently) undermine democratic equality.” See the problem here? If we all must play according to the rules of the few, the game is fixed, and there is no such thing as truly free democracy in action. And using Socrates’ terms, we might conclude that if we listen only to passages that are “poetic and pleasing to the majority of hearers,” we risk closing our minds to harsh realities that might affect us, including being censored by some self-righteous group of elites. 
 
And what do we hear from most political leaders in a democratic republic as they stand on their platforms? Do we hear platitudes that please the masses and distract them from considering their loss of freedom under the new censors? And what is censored? Could these “elites” be out to suppress knowledge and gritty discussion about harsh realities or truths? In censoring in toto any group that threatens their status quo, do they imprison minds in slavish groupthink? Such a slavery is made all the more insidious by the public’s indifference to their own loss of privacy and the means of self-determination. As the researchers note, “the tech giants are now widely said to operate a novel ‘surveillance capitalism’” [34], scooping up enormous amounts of user data and using it to demonstrate to advertisers how effectively they achieve “user engagement” or selling it to third parties at a profit—but destroying “privacy” in the process.”
 
Intrusive surveillance is now part of the weaponry of the censors. Where does one go to spread contrary ideas or criticism that isn’t surveilled? Criticism of the ruling elites appears to flow through a weir of ever decreasing size. The opportunity to discuss freely and even contentiously the values of a democratic republic disappear behind a wall of filters imposed on speech by a few elites who deem themselves to be the arbiters of truth who can identify the who, where, and when of criticism.  
 
That narrowing funnel outlet for free speech is being squeezed by the black hole of intolerance found not only in the censoring elite, but also in the censoring denizens of academia’s ivory towers. But should we be surprised? If even Socrates called for some censorship, there seems to be little hope for a truly free society. I’m reminded that there have been calls from those who walk the hallowed halls of Ivy League schools to censor and blacklist those with whom they disagree. Of course, it’s a myth to think that academia has been a fortress of free thinking. From the earliest universities through the ensuing centuries, academicians have sought to preserve what they adamantly held onto as truth even in the face of contradiction. 
 
Censorship has long been a part of human interaction, even among those who are supposed to be the freest of thinkers. And censorship’s companion has been “acceptable and appropriate” thoughts and expressions. Wow! How Orwellian has our society become? 
 
Wrong question. How Orwellian has society always been? That’s the question. From Socrates to today’s “elites,” censorship, appropriate speech and thought, surveillance, and blacklisting have interfered with any attempts to form a lasting democratic republic. The historic examples are far too numerous to mention. They are so numerous, in fact, that no one should be surprised by the current milieu of censorship.
 
 
*Plato’s Republic. Trans. by G. M. A. Grube. 1974. Indianapolis. Hackett Publishing Company, 
Inc.
 
**https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0244071 The [34] in the quotation is a reference to 
Zuboff S. The age of surveillance capitalism: the fight for a human future at the new frontier of power. New York: Public Affair; 2019.

I don’t often read through comments and chat rooms. Too many people are full of rancor over…
 
Let me choose my word carefully here. 
 
…over ANYTHING. Or, should I say, EVERYTHING.
 
Lots of rancor out there. But I recently came across a series of comments with less rancor than usual. The comments centered on a book about coal and the Fermi Paradox, you know, that statement Fermi made that if the universe has conscious life elsewhere we should have some evidence. * Of course, you and I can think of reasons we lack such evidence, such as the age and size of the universe, both limiting the probability that tiny Earth found itself on the alien highway to discovery.
 
And then there’s that joke I’ve retold, the one that was once picked as the greatest joke ever: Dr. Watson and Sherlock Holmes go camping. In the middle of the night, Sherlock wakes his companion and says, “Watson, Watson, wake up!” Groggy Watson awakes, and Sherlock says, “Look up and tell me what you observe and deduce.” Watson says, Fermi-like, “I see thousands of stars, and I deduce there are uncountable more that I cannot see. Around some of those stars there are planets, and some of those planets have life. And among those planets are some with intelligent life. Therefore, I deduce that we are not alone in the universe.” To which Sherlock responds, “No, you idiot, someone stole our tent.”
 
So, anyway, the rancor-less conversation I came across centered on an argument that coal is the reason we are the technological giants we claim to be. The Industrial Age and then the Technological Age were given their start by energy from coal. The author makes the claim that since coals formed during only 2% of Earth’s existence, its rarity of formation might mean that no coals formed on other Earth-like planets, keeping intelligent life there at the pre-Industrial level we had before 1750. In the rancor-less debate, one commenter even shows the argument to be a faulty syllogism. Now, there’s the kind of debate we need more of, that is, the kind of debate based on logic and the refutation of logical fallacies.
 
Alas, that’s not what we usually find in rapid-fire comment sections online. Emotions well up. Heat builds, and another paradox raises its unsolvable head: If humans are intelligent beings, why do they spend so much time wallowing in emotion? Coal-fired power plants provide the energy for speed-of-light discussions that embroil “intelligent creatures” in the fiery rancor. 
 
Now, of course, like you, I would like to see the resolution of the problem about our seemingly isolated place in the Cosmos. We’ve found and are still finding many extra-solar planets, but we haven’t found intelligent life, and certainly, we haven’t found evidence of visitors from other worlds. Seven billion living and 100 billion past humans haven’t produced any such irrefutable evidence. But we still keep hoping—and arguing. And we grab onto anything that seems like evidence, such as the recently detected signals coming from our Sun’s nearest neighbor star, or such as the famous “Wow!” signal. In our continuous state of hope we are like the audience of a Big Foot reality show, the cast going off to places where people saw Sasquatch while the audience awaits the airing of each weekly episode of a pre-recorded season. Does the audience think that someone wouldn’t leak to the media the find of the century? 
 
I know this might generate a negative or even a heated reaction, but with regard to intelligent alien life, I usually say, “So what!” Unless there’s a mechanism to send light faster than it goes to carry a signal to Proxima b, the message takes four-plus years to get there, assuming our aim is correct since both we and Proxima b are moving. We have to exhibit the skills of a great quarterback or skeet shooter, leading the moving target whose position is in constant flux. So, say we have that skill. Now, on the other end the alien intelligence has to have the same skill, the will to respond, and the wherewithal to make the response in hopes that at the time the return signal passes Earth, we, too, some minimum nine years hence, are both listening and lucky enough to intercept it. 
 
But maybe I should redirect what I’m saying about alien matters to Earthly matters, specifically to matters of discussion among so-called intelligent Earthlings. Maybe there’s a lesson that I can apply to heated discussions I see online. And it involves the response time. 
 
The flames of heated arguments are fanned by immediacy. Online, someone says something, and immediately from around the world come rancor-filled responses. What if—just postulating here—what if no one could respond to a statement for four-plus years, or even nine years? Nothing puts out flames better than time. 
 
Does it really matter in the absence of evidence that the universe might house intelligent life ubiquitously? What if we discover that intelligent life elsewhere is just as rancor-filled as intelligent life is on Earth? “No, no, no,” you are probably thinking. “That conclusion is the product of faulty logic. You can’t assume that intelligence elsewhere is similar to intelligence here. Many science fiction writers have imagined quite the opposite kind of beings, beings like Dr. Spock or like the robots and androids of numerous stories.”
 
We can’t speed up light beyond its cosmic limit. True, if space is stretching, then relative to us light travels faster, but there’s no galactic local analog of such a phenomenon. Light goes what it goes. Communicating means riding that fast and no faster. But maybe for the sake of peaceful communication, we should see whether or not we can’t s.  l.  o.  w. light down. 
 
Think of the consequences for internet chat rooms and comment sections if we didn’t have access to coal-fired electrical plants that power the response grid. No immediate flare ups of emotion-filled responses. Think of playing a chess game by mail. I make a move. I write a letter to my opponent detailing the move. My opponent makes a counter move and then writes me a letter telling me the details of the move. I make another move and write another letter, and so on. Imagine slowing down the pace of the discussions we see online and in social media. 
 
Burning coal did lead to a rapid expansion first of industry and then of modern technology. Could we be where we are at this time without the heat stored over a mere 2% of Earth history? Not sure. To paraphrase what one rancor-less commenter states in that discussion I read, we can’t assume that had Newton not been born that someone else would not have seen and understood why an apple falls from its tree. And, as another argues, we can’t assume that wood-powered or hydro-powered sources of energy wouldn’t have gotten us to our current industrial and technological status—though that is really a stretch considering that wood and peat don’t have the BTUs that coals readily release upon burning and that hydro-power sources aren’t mobile. Burning coal, we might argue, led to the rapidity of our modern responses, and that rapidity seems to have enabled our fast emotion to outpace our slow reason. 
 
Anyway, the point here is diminishing rancor. If we could just slow down a bit, we could allow emotions to lose energy and reason to gain it. The next time you feel the urge to respond immediately, think of sending that message to Proxima b or of playing chess by mail. 
 
*The discussion occurs here:  https://www.physicsforums.com/threads/coal-and-the-fermi-paradox.998509/   

A conversation on a hill in Tanzania * between two amateur paleoanthropologists, call them Claude and Terra, might go like this.
 
Claude, interrupting his humming of “Oh! Very Young” by Cat Stevens, asks: “Do you think our early hominin ancestors were concerned about their legacies?” 
 
Terra, looking up, says: “Strange question, but no, I don’t think habilis made tools with grandchildren in mind.”
 
Claude: “My brain’s been running an earworm rendition of “Oh! Very Young” by Cat Stevens, so I began thinking about why we’re here, digging around in the dirt of Tanzania.”
 
Terra: “Good song. Well, isn’t why we’re here obvious? We’re looking for ancient signs of human habitation, the bits and pieces of stone ancient hominins used as tools and maybe, if we’re really lucky, their bones. Maybe we’ll find the next ‘Lucy,’ only ours will be a rather complete skeleton of Homo habilis. There’s a publication and maybe even a book deal in that, maybe some fame, possibly our own legacy among paleoanthropologists. But definitely, I’m getting a dissertation out of this and probably a position in a university.”
 
Claude: “When I look through this dirt to find a piece of broken stone here or there, I see nothing to indicate that Homo habilis thought about legacy, but then, when I see garbage along the side of a highway back home, I guess I believe we do the same with our stuff, only in greater quantities. And just the way I want to ascribe or project my emotions on my dog, I suppose I anthropomorphize even other kinds of anthrops, ascribing human emotions, desires, thinking, and actions to them, and that’s what made me wonder about how they perceived the future. Do you have a will?”
 
Terra: “How did you get from thinking about whether ancient hominins thought about what they were leaving behind on their footpaths or in their encampments to asking me about a will?”
 
Claude, turning over a clod: “Well, a will is a transfer of legacy. You know, it’s the stuff you can’t take with you when you ‘ride that great white bird into heaven,’ as Cat Stevens sings. It’s your gear, your clothing, your house, maybe even your company. I’ve been wondering whether or not ancient hominins like Homo habilis, the ancestral tool-user, said upon dying, ‘I leave all my flint to my beloved spouse and my wildebeest-skin suit to my eldest child.’ That’s the kind of will I was thinking about, the stuff that can be associated with a person’s accomplishments, the kinds of life-remnants that tie the past to the future. 
 
“In our time, we seem to think that almost everything we leave behind is significant, not just the physical and financial stuff, but also the life record. You hear legacy discussed about every leader when people say, ‘The CEO left a legacy we’ll long remember,’ or, ‘The treaty between Country A and Country B is the diplomat’s legacy,’ or even, ‘Relativity is Einstein’s legacy,’ and ‘Parson Brown’s legacy is this magnificent church and all the marriages over which he presided.’ That’s what I’m thinking when I think about either will or legacy, and that’s why I ask whether ancient hominins thought about what they were leaving behind, their legacies being the stuff of their last wills and testaments—unwritten, of course, but still associated with the accomplishments of the deceased. And I guess while I’m thinking about it, wouldn’t it be great to discover evidence that one generation of habilis looked back on a previous generation and memorialized it just as we have enshrined legacies of our predecessors in memorials, buildings, and especially in the many statues we place in town squares and public halls?”
 
Terra, finding no terra cotta in her sieve says without looking at Claude: “Get real. These ancient hominins didn’t have such complex thoughts or complex technologies. They didn’t even have complex language to express such thoughts as far as we know. Look! We’re digging around for two-million-year-old artifacts that are nothing more than chipped rocks, not for the marble statuary of some Homo michaelangelonensis. We don’t find statues memorializing anything or anyone until Homo sapiens fashioned those Venus figurines of 35,000 years ago, long after Homo habilis passed into the dust we’re digging up. I don’t think Homo habilis spent much time thinking about legacies, about memorializing, or about a distant future.”
 
Claude: “What if we could get in a hypothetical time machine? Just daydream with me for a moment under this hot sun in this rather forsaken place. Take yourself back to the time of Homo habilis, some 2 to 2.5 million years ago in northern Tanzania and pretend you are now one of the so-called tool-users, the first of your kind as later hominins reckon your kind. You find some useful stones, hard cherty, flinty stuff, that you can chip into a tool. But you are about eight miles from your open-air encampment, so you carry the stones purposefully back to your family, where you chip away. The process indicates that you have some sense of a future, if only an immediate one. I’m not saying that you could anticipate the arrival of paleoanthropologists 2 to 2.5 million years later. Heck, even as aware as I am, I still can’t imagine what hominins might do should they survive the next two million years, so, you as a member of habilis probably can’t imagine a group of your descendants arriving on the site where you live but using more sophisticated tools like shovels, picks, and theodolites connected to satellites. Purposefully leaving anything for the future might imply some understanding of how indefinite the future is.
 
“Back then, two million years ago, if you had foreseen this future, the one that has me digging for your tools, would you have made finding artifacts easier for me, your distant descendant? With your primitive technology would you have neatly arranged some rocks to make a stone time capsule? Would you even have cared that there would be a distant future? Or were you so wrapped up in daily life that you had little time for any speculation? Could your small brain even process a future beyond tomorrow’s need for a sharpened piece of flint? You had to have had some ability to anticipate. Shaping rocks for tools indicates at least some sense of anticipation, some ability to plan, and planning is nothing if it is not first an acknowledgement of a future.
 
“And if I could put you back in the time machine after you lived for a while as habilis, and then transport you to our present, what would you make of tan obsession with legacies, with all our wills, memorials, and statues? Certainly, you had back then to be aware of the passage of time as you and your family aged. Surely, that small brain of yours was aware that individuals die from disease, predation, and conflict and that others take their place just as you took the place of the previous generation and your offspring would take your place. You had to have had some sense of a future, at least of a future extending into the ensuing generation. Did it cross your mind to ask, ‘Where did all these little members of my family come from? Why am I caring for them?’
 
“If your tool-making was not a matter of mere instinct, if you actually ‘invented’ each new tool by taking raw rock and shaping it for a task, then surely, thought played some role in your care for your offspring. You were a tool-use who accumulated tools. So, in your old age did you hand down your stone tools as an inheritance just as the people of the twenty-first century Anno Domini might pass along the flatware and dishes of their grandparents?
 
“From the perspective of two million years ago, would you marvel that we pass along as our legacies not just our tools but also our thoughts? Until your hominin descendants learned to paint on rocks and cave walls long after your species became extinct, no such legacies persisted. Could you tell stories? Relate histories? If I traveled to visit you way back then would I find that you are mute around the campfire as you chip your stone tools? Did you even have controlled fire? We have no evidence that you had fires even though we have evidence that you chipped flint. Surely, you noticed the sparks? Surely, you accidentally ignited some nearby dry brush. But you left us nothing about fire or stories. Two million years might have passed till your hominin descendants learned to control fire and Prometheus-like passed on that ‘tool’ to me. 
 
“In that youas Ms. Habilis and I as Mr. Sapiens are tool-users, we have a commonality. In that you and I both leave stuff just lying around, you know, the way your species leaves chipped stones on the ground and my species leaves garbage thrown from car windows, in that way, in leaving stuff without much thought you ancient representative of habilis and I modern representative of sapiens are much alike. But we differ in that I am more aware of a deeper past and of a myriad of possible futures. And my species leaves more stuff randomly lying around. Unlike you, habilis, I might be concerned about leaving something not just for the next generation but for multiple generations, my legacy lying not just in my tools, but importantly, in massive pyramids and even more so in thought. Isn’t it that legacy of thought that distinguishes me as much as anything else from you on a level you could not understand? I am both closely related to and widely different from your species, Ms. Terra Habilis.” 
 
Terra, resuming her digging: “I know one thing. If I got into that time machine to go back, I wouldn’t hear such a long-winded rambling. Let’s focus on the present which is supposed to be devoted to digging up the past. Do I want to have a legacy? Sure. I’d like people to remember me, and I’d like to leave the world a better place than I found it, whatever ‘better’ means. Maybe I’ll discover something in these scattered remnants that will explain why we are what we are and why we are so different from our ancient ancestors. Maybe I’ll be the one to definitively prove that habilis was concerned more about the present than the future. Or, maybe I’ll be the one to discover that habilis did think about the future. If just one of these stone artifacts looked like a statue, I would discover that just as we look to the past, work in the present, and plan for legacies, so habilis did the same.”
 
Claude, singing: 
Oh very young, what will you leave us this time
You're only dancing on this earth for a short while
And though your dreams may toss and turn you now
They will vanish away like your daddy's best jeans
Denim blue, fading up to the sky
And though you want them to last forever, you know they never will
And the patches make the goodbye harder still…
 
…And though you want to last forever, you know you never will
And the goodbye makes the journey harder still
 
Terra, thinking aloud and raising an eyebrow: Did habilis women have to listen to singing habilis men? 
 
 
Notes:
*SciNews. 2-Million-Year-Old Stone Tools Unearthed in Tanzania. 11 Jan 2021 Online at http://www.sci-news.com/archaeology/ewass-oldupa-stone-tools-09236.html    Accessed January 15, 2012.  Drawings of habilis are speculative, of course, but there is one in the Smithsonian makes the species human-like: https://humanorigins.si.edu/evidence/human-fossils/species/homo-habilis  It is the Smithsonian image I have included here.

Has technology made you more independent? Sure, you have a car to drive anywhere, but you do so on roads others have built, and you must stop to fuel the car with gasoline others provide. Even that electric car you’ve considered buying requires electricity that you do not produce. It’s difficult to break from the complexities of dependence. But maybe in the future…Alert! Here comes the dream sequence. Cue the dreamy tune and blurry filmography to show the passage of time. ** 
 
Time: The not-too-distant future.
Place: Your skin.
Object: Wearable thermoelectric clothes.
Purpose: Turning your entire body into an independent charging machine.
Result: You have become your own power station
 
Twilight Zone music: do dee do da, do dee do da, do dee do da—boing! And here we are back in the present to consider how technology and incessant inventiveness will affect your life.
 
A group of collaborating technologists and scientists has made great strides in developing a flexible material that has the potential to turn your body heat into useable electricity. * Attached to human skin, the material will potentially would you into a charging station. Who knows, you might even be able to stop in the mall parking lot to start some poor soul’s dead battery with a charge from your sleeve. Certainly, you won’t be asking, “Where’s my charging cord?” You’ll be wearing it, and it will be directly plugged into the power station called you.
 
When you’re wearing your thermoelectric fashions at some future event, will someone come up to ask for a light? No, not fire for a cigarette, but rather for some LED embedded in his or her clothing. Nighttime runners, highway flag holders, and bicyclists will do away with reflective tape and flashlights as they become self-lighted. And at extravagant balls, women will wear not besequinned dresses and men not besequinned jackets, but outfits outfitted with a million little LEDs that derive their power from their skin, and those LEDs will glow brighter as the wearers dance and generate more body heat. Eveready and Duracell will go out of business. Copper mines will fail as the demand for wires diminishes.  
 
Of course, given the current drive toward connecting everyone through technology instead of through bars, parties, and chance meetings at the coffee shop, you might wonder whether or not such wearable electronics might also be used to bind people in ways that conflict with their desire for independence. Sure, if you wear your thermoelectric running shirt, you’ll be able to go for a run or drive without having to attach a 10,000-foot extension cord to your smart watch or to your electric car battery, but in your new intimate arrangement with technology, you might risk being connected in ways that impinge on your independence, much in the manner that Google and Amazon know what you want to buy and then direct you toward a product. Will con artists and hackers then figure some way to rob you of your power? Will you say as you stand along life’s highway, “My shirt died”? Will you report, “Someone stole my power”?
 
Now you have a new problem. Do you order a wearable thermoelectric charging sweat suit on Amazon in the belief that it will make you independent, or do you reject such clothing in the belief that it will make you more connected than you wish? And that dilemma should make you wonder about the nature of your independence and dependence and the dichotomy of mind and body. Is Big Tech on the verge of controlling both your mind and body? 
 
You want to believe you’re independent, that you are a free soul who can survive on your own, and you now suppose that wearable thermoelectrics might help you achieve and maintain said independence. But then, you realize that you didn’t come up with the idea of wearing clothing your body electrifies. And you didn’t invent the actual thermoelectric device that might or might not contain some hidden feature of control. You’re now wondering whether you aren’t the guy who merely uses the wheel someone else invented. Without someone else’s inventiveness, you might be like the Incas who had great roads but no wheels. Without the new thermoelectrics, you will wear nice clothes that do nothing more than generate useless and shocking static electricity you pick up from the rug. Thermoelectric fashion wearers will look on you with disdain. Clothing that merely generates static electricity will be banned. You’ll be forced either by peer pressure or by the Federal Bureau of Wearable Electronics to wear thermoelectric clothing. 
 
Of course, living in a world that others have invented doesn’t mean you can’t live somewhat independently. You can always use objects with slight alterations. And you can always qualify what you mean by independence. Redefining is, after all, a sign of your times. But then, if your independence is merely a matter of slightly altering meaning in a world already created for you, are you not like someone who merely changes the arrangement of furniture in a tract house? All the neighbors live in similar houses with only a limited number of potential furniture arrangements or feng shui? You might think your interior décor is different and a mark of your independence, but a couch is a couch regardless of its superficial covering and its placement blocking the door or steps is simply the fool’s way to independence. 
 
What exactly does “being independent” mean at this point in human history or in the midst of all the inventions of the industrial and technical age? You keep asking, “How independent am I really?” Even without those inventions you are accustomed to using, does the gregarious nature of the species prohibit true individuality and independence? 
 
Were people always mostly dependent? Was unavoidable dependence the reason for philosophy? Did Thales, Anaximander, Anaximenes, Heraclitus, Plato, and Aristotle see the need for philosophizing as a mechanism for acquiring some semblance of independence in a world crowded by inventions and interconnected minds? Were they foreshadowing Descartes by saying, “I philosophize; therefore, I am independent.” And as an offshoot of philosophy, isn’t psychology another form of identifying independence or its antithesis? 
 
Shoot! Now you’re concerned not just about the technology others invented for your use, but that your personal philosophy and identity have also already been invented and that you are wearing the mental clothing designed and powered by those ancient philosophers and ancestral members of your culture. Is it possible that your neurons have been electrified by someone else’s philosophical inventiveness? Do they, and not you, power your thoughts?  
 
Does a mere declaration of independence make one independent? Did your high school English teacher make you read Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre? Recall that among other themes, the novel focuses on independence. Brontë has the main character Jane say, “I am a free human being with an independent will.” Jane also declares, “I care for myself. The more solitary, the more friendless, the more unsustained I am, the more I will respect myself.” Are such statements merely a form of defensive defiance designed to support a myth of true independence? Is fictional Jane truly independent? Are you? 
 
In that mind-body dichotomy does either the mind or the body achieve independence? There seems to be little doubt about physical dependence given the enveloping products of industry and technology. Even a hermit gets a start in the context of a society he or she eventually rejects either by going naked or by making clothes from the plants and animals found in the wild.  
 
Would you become more independent if you wore clothing you could use to generate electricity? Can you picture yourself in the wilderness, powering through your thermoelectric clothes an electric stove to cook the food you grew or caught? Is the life of a hermit the only truly independent life? Is the electrified hermit the ultimate example of human independence? Will you order your thermoelectric outfit on Amazon and have it shipped to the woods as you leave behind your physical, social, philosophical, and psychological tract house to start your hermetic life? 
 
Independence. Considering it generates many questions, but few answers.  
 
Notes:
*National Research Council of Science and Technology. 13 Jan. 2021. Flexible thermoelectric devices enable energy harvesting from human skin. TechXplore. Online at https://techxplore.com/news/2021-01-flexible-thermoelectric-devices-enable-energy.html  Accessed January 13, 2020.
 
**Inception: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SswRnJgX1_s

Stuck in quarantine and bored? It’s time to rummage through the old photo albums and loose pictures stored in shoeboxes under the couch. Go ahead, get them out. I’ll wait a moment…
 
There! That’s you as a baby: Cute, innocent, unaware even that your own feet exist. And that’s the picture when you first noticed your feet or hands, the beginning of self-discovery. There you are on an early birthday; you don’t know which, but maybe your third or fourth. School days next, elementary school through awkward teenage high school years. Look, there are the photos related to job, college, wedding, outing with friends or family, mug shot, whatever, all of them seeming to fall in a sequence of individual events, each of them marking a point on a line, and that line perceived as the same line, a continuum of your life. 
 
And yet, how real is the line? How real are the connections between the photos of that baby, the child, the teen, the young adult, and the person whose image you see in a mirror today? 
 
If you are interested in how you came to be the person you currently are, that’s an interest worth some introspection. Can you actually recognize a continuum? Or do you see your life in those photos like the saccades of eyes scanning the lines of an autobiography? 
 
Remember “The Rainbow” by Wordsworth? Oh! right; that’s the title given it by people not named Wordsworth. You might know it from its first line, “My Heart Leaps Up,” or from its most famous line, “The Child is father of the Man.” Many have repeated that famous thought, even the bands Beach Boys and Blood, Sweat, and Tears, the latter group changing it to “Child is father to the man.”
 
Was that baby your parent? Did that baby in the photo engender your character? What are the connections you see among those photos other than some similar facial features? Does each photo represent a different “parent” of the person you see in your latest selfie?
 
Is your life a continuum or a discontinuous series of individuals represented by those photos? There’s a Calculus here that begs another question. Is the continuum of your life something you merely impose from the perspective of a personal history? Are you the living manifestation of an arrow flying smoothly or one moving in jerks from position to position? 
 
Would you argue that the film of your life is actually a sequence of still photos? Is your life a demonstration of Xeno’s paradox or its resolution? Scan those pictures now laid out in sequence on the coffee table. Is that baby in the first photo parent to one, some, or all of the others? Or is it an ancient ancestor with only a distant relationship, like the one that joins you loosely to your Great-great-great-great Grandfather? Are all those photos “generations” of you?