Barbwire by Barbano:The last question

   Everybody knows the dice are loaded.
Everybody rolls with their fingers crossed.
   Everybody knows the war is over.
Everybody knows the good guys lost.
   Everybody knows the fight was fixed.
The poor stay poor, the rich get rich.
   That's how it goes. Everybody knows...
Everybody knows the scene is dead
   But there's gonna be a meter on your bed
That will disclose
   What everybody knows...
   Everybody talking to their pockets.
Everybody wants a box of chocolates
   and a long red rose.
   Everybody knows. Everybody knows.
That's how it goes. Everybody knows.

— Leonard Cohen, 1934-2016

I hope you understand I just had to go back to the island.
— Leon Russell, 1942-2016

The last question
Barbwire by Barbano / Expanded from the 1-24-2017 Sparks Tribune / Expansions in blue

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Be well. Raise hell.

Andrew

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Are we pox, predator, protector or merely proprietor of the beautiful tiny blue marble flying around at 66,000 mph?

To some ways of believing, God gave man dominion over the earth. (I love the use of "dominion" because it begins with Latin for God, perfectly appropriate given that so many billions refuse accept any god not made unto man's image and likeness.)

We may not live alone in the vastness, but how we got the way we are came via divine providence, happenstance or perhaps both.

If not for divine intervention by an asteroid about 65 million years ago (reduce it to a few thousand if you're a hardcore fan of bestselling fiction), we'd be scaly reptilian descendants of the scary velociraptors of Jurassic Park fame.

Their brains were just starting to fold when nuclear winter wiped them out, allowing their favorite snacks, our relatives, to emerge from the ground to begin our conquest.

So what have we done to repay the Good Lord for our good fortune? There will soon be about nine billion of us. President Trump can buy us all for a buck each and have change left over on his Amex.

We have evolved in a world with violence hard-wired into its very DNA, from volcanoes cooking the primordial soup of our spawning, to eating each other, to killing for far less justifiable means.

Poet e.e. cummings wrote that we should "pity this monster mannunkind not. Progress is a comfortable disease: your victim (death and life safely beyond) plays with the bigness of his littleness."

Abraham Lincoln once mused "If we could first know where we are, and whither we are tending, we could then better judge what to do, and how to do it."

Now we know whither we are tending: Into the sun in a billion years or so, plenty of time for us to go the way of the velociraptors and for our hardy replacements (rats? roaches?) to see if they can do better.

What if we survive our exploitive and suicidal tendencies? If so, how?

Try innate electricity. Our brains produce chemical electricity, the essence of communication. We primitives just don't know how to use the power very well.

This monster mannunkind's basest motivation is survival, the primary protector of which is fear. Flight or fight?

Perhaps we can evolve so that the current trend of our primitive computer age continues, ever-improving electronic communication aided by the artificially intelligent tools we continue to create.

If and when all communication inhibitors are removed and we can converse wordlessly via self-generated electricity, we will have overcome fear because each will instantly know everyone else's intentions. No need to second-guess. No need for red buttons to launch missiles.

But will we so evolve at peril to our humanity as defined by our emotions. Love or hate? Laugh or cry? Joy or sorrow? Flight or fight?

Will we miss transfiguration by morphing into semi-organic transformers?

Art, music, beauty — all may survive but will our super-intelligent, perfectly attuned descendants see their purpose when human expression is instantly communicated and thus homogenized by internetic-kinetic energy?

A world without mystery, surprise and, yes, fear, becomes a world without wonder. When all is known, will everything that makes us human get lost?

That is the question.

Godspeed.

Be well. Raise hell. / Esté bien. Haga infierno.
______________
Andrew Barbano is a 48-year Nevadan and editor of NevadaLabor.com. E-mail <barbano@frontpage.reno.nv.us> Barbwire by Barbano has originated in the Sparks Tribune since 1988.

HAPPY NEW YEAR / Feliz Año Nuevo
Frohe Weihnachten und beste Wuensche fuer 2017
Happy High Holly Days
Merry Christmas/Kwanzaa/Solstice/Festivus/Chanukah
Hope you and yours experienced enthralling Thanksgibleting.

Be well. Raise hell. / Esté bien. Haga infierno. (Pardon my Spanglish.)

ONLINE EXTRAS —>

END OF TIMES SURVIVAL KIT. Defend yourself with humorous or humorless but always-peerless predictions for 2017 by subscribing to the Barbwire Confidential News Service.

Last year's dark foreshadowings unfortunately became reality, so I suggest inoculation by signing onto the HushHush! list at BallotBoxing.US/

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TOMORROW'S NEWS TODAY: FEEL UP YOUR FIRE METER. The Reno Gazette-Journal did big spreads on three consecutive Sundays (Sept. 14, Sept. 21 and Sept. 28, 2014) on NV Energy smart meter fires. Welcome aboard. Barbwire readers were two years ahead on the fire meter issue. (Touch a Smart Meter, Go to Jail — 11 October 2012)

ANTE INTO THE GAME: Support the new season of Barbwire.TV by putting your money where my mouth is. A thousand thanks to those who keep sending show suggestions.

I encourage you to donate to the cause at Barbwire.TV/ The medium that shapes public opinion needs at least one refuge where it is not filtered through the distorted green eye shades of prissy corporate accountants for whom profit is the only priority; where self-censorship is the journalist's normal work environment and where all sins of omission are tacitly encouraged and forgiven with the wave of a balance sheet. This is important. We've got a lot of work to do.