Now You See Me

So... it's been almost 23 years, apparently, on September 11, 1990, when then President George Herbert Walker Bush stood before an audience of congressmen and, actually, the whole world audience watching on TV, and he spoke about the coming "new world order". His choices of words and phrases, ripples that formed into wave after wave of events, have sent all of us spiralling toward this moment. Right. Now.

I remember this speech. I don't remember if I watched it on TV, or heard clips of it in the news, or read about it in the papers and magazines. At that time I was seventeen years old and had just graduated from high school. My path took me to Hollywood, California, where I was to begin one of the most life-altering years of my existence here on this planet, and let me just say now that I am very grateful that my path led me to there and not into Operation Desert Shield or Operation Desert Storm.

I recommend you queue the video to 6 minutes, 33 seconds. Then, at around 7 minutes... listen very closely.

As we stand on the edge of yet another war I find it important to reflect on the smallest moments.

Life consists of moment after moment, and in particular moments we perceive our experiences in a negative light. Universally, the human condition involves suffering, pain, loss, fear, and galaxies of other difficult and challenging situations. When we are in the moment and we are still moving amongst these challenging pieces to our lives, or we are reliving them from a vantage point in the future, we may find it difficult to salvage anything positive about our experiences. We might become cynical, jaded, or just numb with inability to see the light from the dark.

What I know now, however, is that all is fleeting. All is momentary. All is ephemeral and temporary. For, the moment we acknowledge the perception of our experience the experience has passed.

'And this too shall come to pass'.

And it is for this reason -- because all is fleeting -- and because we always have a choice -- that we can choose to see any experience in a positive light. For it is ALL our experience -- it is ALL of the moments -- that makes us who and what we are. It is ALL our experience that makes up the human condition.

I can't say with any certainty that I know why things happened the way they happened other than to say that things happened the way they did so that right now things would be the way they are.

Appearances can be deceptive. The way things are right now might seem to be different than what we want or desire them to be. They may seem to be unexpected and surprising. They may seem to be falling into place just right. They may seem discordant and chaotic. Things are not always as they seem.

It's an oft-quoted, simple thought. You might accuse me of stating the obvious.

Then again, sometimes we need to be reminded of oft-quoted, simple thoughts.
So, here it is again:
Things are not always as they seem.

Review: America by Design

America by Design by David F Noble

My rating: 4 of 5 stars



I read this book more than ten years ago, and I'm just reviewing it now. It's one of those books that I found in a bibliography or references cited section of another book I had been reading. That book was probably either a John H. Bodley book (author of Victims of Progress) or some other sociology-related tract. Perhaps, it was Langdon Winner's The Whale and the Reactor, which was another great book that develops a similar theme. In America By Design, Noble describes the co-evolution of technology, science, and, that all-important element of capitalism, the corporation. I don't recall the specifics of Noble's argument, other than to say that he clearly demonstrates that all three of these elements of modern society worked together in their development. They drove each other. It struck me as a very post-modernist kind of argument, as it employed the 'science does not work in a vacuum' theoretical framework, in that business decisions often drove the science and thus, drove the technology. Of course, at other times, the technology is what drove the science decisions, which drove the business decisions, and so forth.



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