The Status of the World at October 2, 2010 - Brought to you by Yahoo!
NOTE: This article was written by author Douglas Castle for publication in The Global Futurist (http://TheGlobalFuturist.blogspot.com), The Internationalist Page (http://TheInternationistPage.blogspot.com), the GICBC Blog (http://GICBC.blogspot.com), and the author's personal blog, Daily Burst of Brilliance, at http://aboutDouglasCastle.blogspot.com. Blogs, RSS feeds and widgets by this author can be found at http://www.DouglasCastleBlogsosphere.com, which is hosted by TNNWC Group, LLC at http://www.TNNWC.com. Please visit the site. Thank you. - DC
Dear Friends, Fellow Futurists and Internationalists:
The news items which follow were aggregated and published on October 2nd by Yahoo! from a variety of mainstream media sources. I take no credit for any of the content, and I have reproduced it here in true form, without editing, redaction or technological trickery.
While the news items themselves are of considerable interest and cover a wide range of topics, from professional sports to a political prisoner of conscience (the Chinese sometimes refer to people such as these as "dissidents" whereas in ancient Greece they might have been called "great thinkers" or "philosophers" -- but then again, there was that hemlock incident with Socrates) who is to be awarded a Nobel Prize for his brilliant work... if you look at each of these items they are fascinating.
But more importantly, if you look at the worldview built upon the aggregation of all of these items, it seems either comical or tragic (or perhaps both) that we seem to be living in a time where things just do not make any sense.
These are times of biting irony, ideas and laws carried to senseless extremes, and a public dominated by a media atmosphere comprised of an incongrous mix of low-budget (but enormously successful) "reality" shows; advertisements with such high-speed, roller-coastering imagery that you cannot figure out what product, service or brand is being promoted (perhaps there are some subliminal cues); stories of incredible fraud and corruption (which are creating such sensorial fatigues that most people just say "ho-hum"); threats of annihilation any day now, caused by any number of possibilities, from terrorists with nuclear weapons, to increasingly virulent strains of diseases, to radical climatic change.
The not-so-silly bottom line is that people are being overloaded by all of this fast-breaking information to the point of resigned enslavement. The muscles and joys of the imagination, stimulating conversation (without interruptions every minute from cell phone calls and text-message alerts), and simple quietude and contemplation are rapidly atrophying and even vanishing --- living is being replaced by functioning.
Most of the world's populace has neither the time (all of it is consumed with high-velocity messaging, worrying about the next next task while screwing up the one being performed at that moment, juggling too many obligations), nor the inclination (we are too tired to think, so we resort to media or games in order to block out the burden of any more thinking and doing) to do any living in the present moment - the notion of genuine relaxation (just as the notion of retiring comfortably on your pension) and the enjoyment of just passing the time with a hobby, with a casual conversation, or in the act of truly existing consciously in the fleeting magic of the present moment, is disappearing.
My fear is that we are becoming increasing robotic - and far less Human. The joy of doing a defined job, playing a defined role, and enjoying leisure is fading fast. If we don't remove ourselves from the noise, clutter, litter and ever-increasing complexity of our lives, our lives might not any longer be worth living.
One factor evidencing this saddening trend is that suicides among college-aged youth and Baby Boomers are increasing at an incredible pace throughout the world.
Why would so many people wish to end their lives if they could still experience joy? There is a crisis here -- our species is doing something that is contrary to what we once thought was a general rule governing all living creatures -- that is the hard-wired "need" or "propensity" to live, to grow and to reproduce.
Don't laugh -- I believe that we are exterminating ourselves as we cease to act like living organisms and try, with increasing commitment, to be robotic.
We might be drawing frighteningly close to the end of the Human Experience.
More frightening than killing each other, we are increasing opting-out of a life that is more painful than promising. And that breaks my heart.
Faithfully,
Douglas Castle
TODAY - October 02, 2010
Player let $21 million check sit in house
For a couple of weeks, Washington's Albert Haynesworth didn't deposit an enormous check. His reasoning
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Douglas Castle
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