Мне любопытно, о том, несколько сотен из вас посетили мой блог. Я рада, что вы изучают английский язык, и я надеюсь, что вы также не узнать плохие привычки у нас есть. Вы должны стараться, чтобы оставить комментарий, нажав на это слово ниже каждой проводки. Я хотел бы знать, что вы думаете. То есть цель этого блога.
I'm curious about a few hundred of you for visiting my blog. I am glad that you are learning English, and I hope that you also do not learn bad habits we have. You should try to leave a comment by clicking on the word below each posting. I would like to know what you think. That is the purpose of this blog.
Moving along here, I have a Chinese neighbor whom I admire very much. She is a very smart and very hard-working "Tiger Mom" with two daughters now at or recently graduated from university. We were talking the other day about politics, and I very much wanted her opinion, because she was raised around Beijing. As the subject got to this recent American election, and its insanity, I asked her, "What do you think of all that?" She replied, "Even under a president like Trump, America has no problems like we do in China."
I am not so sure about that. If you read Trump's biography in Wikipedia, there are suggestions of connections with the mob while he was building those casinos which later went broke around Atlantic City, New Jersey. And to digress for a moment, "Who has ever heard of a casino going bust? The mob and its casinos are what first established the famous city of Las Vegas. You'd have to be an idiot to go broke running a casino, unless the people who were backing you wanted to get you out of the picture!" ..... So we don't know for sure if Trump still has any connections to that mob or not. But the possibility is enough to cause worry.
Also, there's been reports that Trump's favorite bedside reading ( in case he reads a lot with a hot young wife like his ) consists of a book or books written by or about Adolf Hitler, and his famous speeches. This may be true, judging by a few of Trump's "Hitler salutes" at his rallies during the campaign. Also along that line, he has recently announced as his choices for at least three important positions as heads of civilian government departments, three former generals from the military. As Rachel Maddow points out in her news show on MSNBC, it is usually only dictators of banana republics that do things like that. In a system calling itself a democracy, they usually try very hard to keep the military out of civilian affairs, because they don't want it taking over the government like it recently did in Egypt.
And all of that, as a lady in the check-out line of my favorite supermarket said yesterday afternoon, while we talked about this as we waited our turns, "Scares the hell out of me, because it's too much like Hitler's beginnings in 1933 and later in the Dirty Thirties." I completely agree. And the frightening thing about all this is that very few of us who lived through those times are still alive to tell about it. The vast majority of today's know-it-all unwashed masses have no idea what "hell on earth" really looks like, smells like, or tastes like. And that's a shame, because it looks like ignorance is permitting history to repeat itself.
I had an unpleasant argument with a psychiatrist one time, because his diploma on the wall said that he had graduated from the University of Munich, perhaps better known as the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, and he had made a remark that he was just a small child during the Second World War, and he can remember crawling on his hands and knees through the gutter of the street while it was running red with blood from the results of a bombing raid that had just happened. (Horrible!) He also remarked that as a result of all that and other similar experiences, he had spent three years himself in a mental institution.
At that moment, I was confronting him about addictive pills he had prescribed which were interfering with my abilities to operate the hydro-electric power station where I worked. I wasn't looking to be compassionate, but rather for an excuse to get away from that bastard's treatments. So rather harshly, I said, "Nobody who has spent three years in a Funny Farm is going to tinker with my brain, so you and your goddamned pills are history as of this moment!" That turned out to be a hasty and premature judgement, but that's another story.
My point, now that we get to it, is that civilization doesn't seem to have learned a damned thing from all those endless war films we see on TV or the Net, because we can't associate those with real life events. We don't imagine those Storm Troopers kicking in our door, pointing their guns at us, and perhaps shooting Grandpa in his rocker across the room. We don't imagine that famous "Primo Uomo" General Patton, and his tank corps roaring into the neighborhood and smashing or blowing up half the buildings in the neighborhood. We have never crawled to safety along a gutter running with blood, wondering how or if we would ever get out of Hell alive, like that long-ago shrink of mine. We have no idea what nameless Hell could be created by a reincarnated Adolf Hitler. And we do not want to find out. Why not?
Let me answer that with a quote from Will Rogers, one of my favorite people:- "You can't say civilizations don't advance. In every war, they kill you in a new way."
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ReplyDeleteInteresting read, Ray. With some graphic, but true moments.
ReplyDeleteWill today´s new media be of some help? The ability of almost all people to talk to each other world wide? Unthinkable in former times, esp at the beginning of last century. Nor necessarily. They don´t function as a medicine, they function as a leverage multiplying and powering their underlying efforts, be they good or bad.
Is there a bigger leverage today for leaders? Absolutely yes, the red button a hundred years ago would just trigger the take off of a Me 109.
Today, the same button would erase civilization not only once, but ten-fold, a hundred-fold.
Have systems and their leaders followed up to the highly increased leverage? Not at all. Is there an education requirement for leaders as is for, say, a window-cleaner? No. It´s very hard work studying to get a certificate to become a doctor who saves lives. It´s so easy (obviously) to become a leader with all the powers at their fingertip to destroy life.
Life, as we know it, is based on evolution.
Lessons not learned will be payed for by extinction.
Lessons learned will let that special branch of a successful life-form prosper, of that form of life which managed to adapt to a peaceful form of living.
Nature itself is our main leader. Nature sets the rules.
It doesn´t matter if one civilization among trillions of other civilizations in a space and time frame we can´t even overlook has a problem. Nobody out there would ever notice.
For there are trillions of other ways of life.
If a few hundred of them succeed, that´d truly be a great achievement by and for nature.
Key to and building block for a better life for all: a good scientific education, free for all.
In my case, my minimal scientific knowledge which I have acquired during the decades mainly by self-teaching made the old world view obsolete. There is no father sitting in his chair in the clouds and punishing bad guys and loving good guys.
We all consist of atoms, particles, waves, we are made of a matter which we can barely understand.
The radius of the universe is 13,8 billion lightyears (!!!), we don´t know what´s beyond.
A lot to think about, a lot to ponder. All astronauts who came back from travelling space were in aw of our wonderful planet.
Maybe all leaders should attend a lecture given by some returned astronauts for a start. Whilst at G20 meetings or so.
We love life!