Dan Pallotta

7.15.2004

Friday, July 16, 2004

"A typical whale song lasts for perhaps fifteen minutes; the longest, about an hour. Often it is repeated, identically, beat for beat, measure for measure, note for note. Occasionally, a group of whales will leave their winter waters in the midst of a song and six months later return to continue at precisely the right note, as if there had been no interruption. Very often the members of the group will sing the same song together. By some mutual consensus, some collaborative songwriting, the piece changes month by month, slowly and predictably. These vocalizations are complex. If the songs of the humpback whale are enunciated as a tonal language, the total information content, the number of bits of information in such songs, is some 10(6) bits, about the same as the information content of the Iliad or the Odyssey." - Carl Sagan, Cosmos

This is the realm in which social transformation will occur - the realm of the mysterious, the realm of awe, the realm of surprise, the realm of the unknown. The establishments of the Left and the Right know it not. Political intellectuals know it not. Religious establishment, surprisingly enough, knows it not. The way that the world will be transformed is unknown. It will come from out of nowhere, a force of nature, sweeping away all old reality and ushering in a world of our dreams. There are things we do not know. Like the complexities of whale songs. And we will appreciate them only in hindsight, and then we will say, "of course that's how the world was changed," The way butterflies speak of catepillars.

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7.14.2004

Thursday, July 15, 2004

"Intellectuals solve problems. Geniuses prevent them." - Albert Einstein

Gandhi was a genius. Henry Kissinger is an intellectual. There are a lot of intellectuals running for office on both sides. Consider the fact that you yourself may well be a genius, but because you are not an intellectual, you do not think you belong in a position of leadership.

Think again.

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Wednesday, July 14, 2004

Yesterday the U.N. reported that AIDS has orphaned 15 million children around the world. Most of them live in abject poverty, so on top of having no family, they have no food and no education and no clothing and no home. They roam the streets. What do you suppose that breeds in them?

I was watching some piece on CNN yesterday that showed guerilla military training camps for kids in the Middle East, where they take all the anger of these youth, and channel it toward killing skills.

As I contemplated what kind of a future we are incubating in these abandoned youth - who cannot explore their own compassion because they are trapped in a game of survival, or in their own rage - I was struck by the lack of our imagination. What I mean by that is this - do we not recall that it was a band of rebel youth that sent the British Empire - the mightiest army in the world - packing some 225 years ago? Can we not imagine that these motherless and fatherless and compassionless youth might do the same thing to us?

History repeats itself. Have we forgotten that we rose up against the British Empire because they would not listen to us?

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7.12.2004

Tuesday, July 13, 2004

You know how I say that 8,219 people died of AIDS today and it's not in the newspaper, or that 25,000 people died today of hunger and it's not in the newspaper? Well, today it's in the newspaper. The Los Angeles Times is running a six-part series on hunger and AIDS and poverty in Africa, and it's on the front page - huge story - replacing the headline. Hooray for the Los Angeles Times. I feel as if I slipped into a dreamworld. This is the way I always envisioned the morning newspaper should look when there are millions of people dying of AIDS and hunger. It's quite miraculous.

Every once in a while in a dreary world a surprise comes along. That will be the key to turning this dreary world around. Surprises. Being open to them, and, more important, being the authors of them. Let us surprise the world with the depth of our hope, the expanse of our imagination, and the bravery of our endeavors.

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7.11.2004

Monday, July 12, 2004

Sometimes I look at the state of things and get profoundly sad. Today I saw a television add for some new anti-depressant-class drug designed to dull the effects of stress in our daily lives. It showed images of cellular phones ringing, beepers going off, a person scrambling to make an appointment in traffic, etc.

Discomfort is our only hope. Misery, strangely enough, is our only hope. It is abject misery that ultimately drives the alcoholic to sobriety. If that misery gets numbed, the addiction can continue unabated. So with society. As the system forces us into a less and less human way of life, it is only our misery with it that can lead to a correction. There's a place for anti-depressants, God knows. There are people who suffer from clinical depression and new drugs offer them a hope that never existed before. But soon they will have all of us taking them, at the slightest sign of a feeling, and that's what I fear.

What I saw on TV today was the anesthesia the system will use to dull the misery. With the misery dulled, the stress levels can increase. Society can become more materialistic, less spiritual, more driven, less peaceful, more action-oriented and less being-oriented. We can produce more and consume more. We can become robots.

Then I saw a public service announcement that told me that the Rain Forests used to cover 14% of the earth, now they only cover 6%. I didn't know that. I get so focused on AIDS I forgot all about the fact that we're destroying the planet. And then I recalled that another 8,219 people died of AIDS in the world today, and some 25,000 people died today of hunger and its related diseases. And the system is trying to anesthetize us lest these statistics make us feel any stress or any misery. And right now, I can't figure out how the hell to turn this all around, and frankly, I'm tired of thinking about it and tired of trying to figure out what new event can save the world.

I am sad today. And I don't plan to take a damned thing for it. It lets me know I'm alive.

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