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| Nasturtiums |
You may not know this, but you are living in a lucky age.
It's a time when our world has tilted far too much to a winner/loser mentality.
So much so that democracies are weakening and authoritarian ideas are
strengthening. In a winner/loser world, the essentials of decency and
cooperation, indeed the right to life is debased: winners take all; losers ...
who cares.
My education
took place in another lucky time. I was born exactly one week after the bombing
of Pearl Harbour, December 14, 1941, and lived through the aftermath of two
World Wars, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, and shared the terror with the
whole world as the Nuclear Bomb proliferated to the point where at any moment,
a madman might obliterate life as we knew it. The threat of its use coloured
our Weltanschauung, our worldview, and our political understandings far
more than we acknowledged.
So why
lucky? The events of war and their precursors provided me ... and now you ...
with a laboratory inviting us to think deeply beyond win and lose. What have we
done, what were we thinking that made the debacles in Ukraine, Gaza, Israel,
Iran possible? The conflicts have roots, and woe to us if our thinking goes no
deeper than speculating on who will win, who will lose, and crossing our
fingers in the hope that harm won’t fall on us.
Certainly some of your peers will be content to party and plagiarize their way through their maturing years, as they did in mine. But for those of you whose curiosity and attention has a broader scope than win/lose, self-focused indulgence, I pose five thought experiments. Take them to your brain-lab and reach for evidence-based answers:
1)
Why is the spread between rich and poor growing?
2)
“Freedom of Speech” is an oft repeated
shibboleth. That there are limits is obvious (slander, libel, blabbing state
secrets). What would make a workable description of free speech in a democracy
like Canada.
3)
What conditions are needed for your neighbour to
live a contented life. In other words, does Mazlow's Hierarchy of Needs still
apply?
4)
What is money's purpose, and are we using wealth
appropriately or has its purpose been bastardized with time, and does it
matter?
5) What dangers being predicted concerning the increasing application of Artificial Intelligence are valid, and why?
Obviously, few have time to do the
problem-method-observation-conclusion lab study on six broad issues, but I
challenge you to apply your thinking and research to some of these matters. The
stream of misinformation aided by image manipulation, outright lying,
undeserved adulation and denigration, and partisan gate-keeping at news outlets
is appalling. There's that in our very nature making us vulnerable to bias
confirmation, so it takes an effort to contemplate other viewpoints
judiciously. It's likely going to be your generation that leads us forward
toward sanity ... or allows this “going to hell in a handcart” phenomenon grow
'til the winners can be declared and the losers disposed of.
It's a lucky time for you. If you join hands with your fellow thinkers to create a better future where truth reigns, you will find yourselves in that exhilarating atmosphere of discovery and innovation, like Galileo, Copernicus, Fleming, Einstein, Rousseau … If you have faith in yourselves, you will move mountains.
George G. Epp
306-212-7741
naica (no ai content or
assistance)
