This past week I have been suffering one of those episodes of recurring thoughts and images that intrude, unbidden. I have named this episode "Oz revisited." I was eight living in the land of dust and tornados the year movie the Wizard of Oz was released. My guess is this was the year in my personal life that I began to experience the relief if not always joy in truth illuminating reality.
Now I am here; a lifetime of dedication to search for that truth and reality behind me. I have taken for granted not only the necessity but also the desirability of awareness and knowing. I have on whole assumed that most of my companions share the search and the values driving it. Now we pause in amazement at the realization that a large, near half, of our fellow citizens, reject knowing and are convinced to act not only against their own self-interest but to also abandon impulses to ordinary humaneness and consideration for the vulnerable around them.
Dorin a few days ago sent to me this story of Frank:
http://gamountains.net/talkingstick/franksworld.html My visitation from Oz is now understood as the story of Frank evoked other memories from my own childhood. Memories of hollow eyed men fully 30% unable to find work accepting being shamed by a status quo government claiming the cause was their own flawed characters, that it was only stubborn unwillingness to do the work of "plenty of jobs available."
Unlike Dorothy I have not been suddenly swooped up into a cloud of dust to moments later be deposited in this strange realm of Oz. But it does almost seem so. I wonder if the prosperous rational civil half century of my adulthood was the fantasy.
For some years we have been observers to the gradual erosion of the commonly held knowledge of facts of history and even of science. Fact based reality is being replaced with layers of concretions of fool's gold, gradually creating a world view of inevitable violent death and hopeless paranoia. Laboring in increasing ignorance replaced by superstition, and energizing fear by rage or apathy, millions succumb to the webs of fantasy pleasing to the eyes and ear. It seems so many have fallen into in a "twilight sleep"oblivious to the evisceration.
On reflection it is understood that deprived of alternatives and hope we humans will desperately join to preserve the existing structures in our life environment and the human icons representing them. http://gamountains.net/talkingstick/king.html
Now years since Dorothy was first heard to say "I don't think this is Kansas Toto." I read my father's first letter home from a distant town "My hours are 7 in the morning to 7 at night except Saturday and Sunday when I get off at 5. Voight paid me what he promised Saturday night."
I see his hollow eyes and cannot be angry with Frank or even Ahmad.
It is in my view a good omen for the notion of diminishing the threats of "terrorism" to "nuisances" to be introduced into the current presidential campaign because it can be a hopeful harbinger of a view for the future that does not encompass perpetual miltarism and war. Perhaps a better noun could of been chosen by the Senator but it might not have gained the attention. It only takes the faintest glimmer of a light on the night's horizon to encourage one to abandon the Titanic.
In my view the belief in hope for our collective futures can only be lights if they are informed by knowledge and reflecting reality.
(More on science follows in the final section.)David Baltimore:
Editorial: Science and the Bush Administration Science Magazine September 24, 2004
