Honoring Mother Earth Each Day

On Sunday, Earth Day, I started a new topic on Skin Cell Forum, “Honoring Mother Earth Each Day.“

So far people have contributed a handful of good notions about how we can reduce our cumulative deleterious impacts. Little things which can do a lot of good if enough people do them. That is a good place to post the little notions that are ready for immediate implementation.

The topic title here will be the same, but the emphasis is considerably different. Here I would like to discuss much larger, more challenging notions. Concepts that will require research and development, but which can eventually make a more profound and long lasting difference. The three main subjects will still be Global Warming, the depleted Ozone Layer, and the diminishing supply of Potable Water, but let us all keep our attention on the larger subject of Pollution of the Ecosystem.

If you have an idea which you think could diminish one of these problems in a big way, This is the place to get the ball rolling.

Genocide

Mr. Anthropositor had some difficulty today. April is always a difficult month for him for several reasons. He tends to dwell on several battles with huge bureaucracies and the bureaucratically inspired and abetted genocides on several continents and islands. I can’t tell you why it seems to affect him more in April than in other months. It may have something to do with being required to report to faceless well-conditioned cogs in a soulless governmental machine who don’t even know where or when they err.

I am just the butler, but I feel I know him pretty well. Even so, I don't always see these upheavals coming or quite know why they occur.

Perhaps it is East Timor or the Armenians in Turkey or the Balkans or the Rape of Nanking or the current ongoing genocide in Darfur.

Or perhaps it has to do with the Rwandan genocide of about a million human beings which took place during this time of year which massively disrupted three ancient human cultures; the Twa‘s, the Hutu‘s and the Tutsi‘s.

In a bit more than a quarter of a year, a million people were hunted, tortured, raped and slaughtered. Roughly 10,000 people of all ages PER DAY were murdered. Even babies and young children.

The great superpowers knew about it in the first few days. They watched. They dithered. They applied a bit of ineffectual pressure. They fiddled while Rwanda burned. The could not even sort out who was at fault.

There were no strategic materials at stake in Rwanda. Why bother? Mind our own business. Who among us today even knows exactly who to blame? Perhaps we all are.

Think of it. A million people dead. Raped, beaten, shot, burned, hacked to pieces with machetes and pangas. Less than two dozen people were ultimately tried and imprisoned for these crimes. It was not just the soldiers on both sides of a revolutionary conflict doing this. Mobs of ordinary citizens went on the hunt for other ordinary citizens who were "different" than them. They were continuously moved to commit this ongoing murder and mayhem by Rwandan Radio broadcasts. Day after day. Month after month.

Those broadcasts could easily have been jammed. Why weren't they? Apparently freedom of speech issues. What nonsense! They were convincing people that mass murder was not only acceptable, but a patriotic duty!

I asked Mr. Anthropositor how he can keep thinking of these things. I simply can’t bear it. He said, “Someone needs to give a voice to the dead. I am just a dead man talking.”

And now that I have given him the Elixir of Shrinking Violet to arrest his grief and to silence his ravings, perhaps I must speak a little until he returns to his senses. I certainly don’t want to. I just want to forget. I can no longer bear even the sight of bright red liquids.

I think Mr. Anthropositor would tell you that these extreme examples are just the tip of the iceberg. That there is far more blame to be borne than that of the perpetrators of these crimes. Those who know, and do nothing, share the guilt.

Most Hutu’s and Tutsi’s are good people, just trying to get by and live as well as they are able. Even so, less than two dozen people were later held responsible for the murder of a million human beings! How can that be?

Some of the fault must go back to the original German Colonial regime of the early twentieth century, and the Belgians who took over after World War I. People long dead who were quite sure of the rightness and practicality of their actions.

These empire builders set the wheels of destiny in motion when they granted the Tutsi minority great economic and political advantage over the far more numerous Hutu people.

The Germans and the Belgians are sure to find it objectionable to shoulder the blame for any of this. Did the Belgians not give autonomy to Rwanda when they abandoned the country in 1959?

Well, not exactly. On the way out, they flipped the power structure upside down, apparently using the logic that the majority should take power over the minority which had been in charge of the real management of the country for a half century of colonial rule. That was the real fertilization of this particular serpent’s egg.

Perhaps I have been around Mr. Anthropositor too long. I sound a lot like him. I may even be as verbose. A final thought.

I am quite sure Mr. Anthropositor would point out, genocide is not decreasing. It is spreading. Numbers of victims continue to rise. Numbers of places it occurs continue to rise. The variety and methods of murder continue to rise.

This plague threatens us all. We must find our way to peace. We must find or make common ground no matter how extreme our differences. We must abjure fanaticism and extremism and terrorism in ALL of their forms. We must start now. Or our addiction to hatred will kill us all.
Ichabod

Much Ado About Nothing

(This is my response to a person with no apparent health problems whatsoever, except those in his head. The rest of the thread which initiated this answer can be found on skincell forum.)

Well Skinperson,

I wouldn't be too concerned about the lengthening of the healing process, even at the ripe old age of 29 (four years older than the average lifespan of the Roman citizen 2000 years ago).

I am 66. I guess my healing process virtually stopped about twenty years ago. I am, by all appearances, dead. Naturally, this is of some concern to me, so I pretend I'm living with a certain amount of vigor.

What you have is a discoloration on the tip of your toe which causes you no particular discomfort, and which might well have been initiated by some trauma or other. It is not of the slightest apparent importance, except that it is of concern to you.

This is a clear cut indicator that there is something serious happening. Your Dermacraptitis is at an acute stage and must be addressed immediately. It seriously affects the quality of your life. Do listen to me carefully. This is important.

Dermacraptitis affects the lining of the brain, the cerebral cortex. It can, in advanced cases, eventually be fatal. It is far more likely to foreshorten your life or damage the quality of your living than the age-related lengthening of the healing process.

It is an Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, and if allowed to progress unimpeded, could ruin your life. I saw another case several months ago, of someone who was absolutely determined never to have another flake of skin fall off his head (dandruff).

We shed our skins about as often as snakes do. The difference is, we do not do it periodically all in one piece, but do it continuously a flake at a time, or I should say many flakes at a time. We literally snow flakes of skin. It is a big component of household dust.

I tell most people to listen to their bodies. The body gives many subtle signals which can lead one to healthy life choices which can enhance one's health and wellbeing. In your case, the volume seems to be turned up full-blast.

Pay some attention to your health; good nutrition, adequate rest and exercise, safe sexual practices, the EDUCATED use of trace nutrients, vitamins and minerals.

Do not obsess. I have no medical history on you. The facts presented here are sparse indeed. Even so, what I have seen sets off all kinds of alarm bells.

Get ahold of yourself sir (metaphorically speaking). And welcome to Skin Cell Forum.

Anthropositor (aka Dead Man Talking)

(Please note, I did not coin the word dermacraptitis. Skinperson did. It was therefore not prohibitively rude for me to use the word in making my point.)

Response To A Query About My Cuff Link Design

Hi Penny,
I agree entirely with your perspective. Having two grown boys, I remember well making my employment decisions based on their needs when they were young. It certainly paid off for me, not in money, but in the results of their upbringing. I could not be prouder of either one of them. I am a fortunate man indeed.

I was able, because of those same decisions to take care of my father personally after he suffered a massive stroke, which paralyzed one side of his body. He ultimately recovered fully and lived another seven years. I was his sole caregiver. This experience made me rather determined to do my best not to put my children through the same sort of thing, particularly before their children are grown. (My youngest grandson Cheval is autistic.)

I have mixed feelings about outsourcing labor. I realize that there are some practical reasons for it, but I am in full agreement with you that it is better to find other ways. Too that end, my emphasis as an inventor and innovator has been on finding ways of reducing labor by design.

It was for that reason that these cuff links did not really seem to me at first glance to be all that inventive. It is only upon reflection that I realize that they could really impact the course of events in men's fashion.

One of the negative impacts of the industrial mode of thinking is that we wind up with millions of identical copies of junk for the masses. Even if the design is artful originally, after seeing it reproduced everywhere, its' impact is totally lost.

When I attend a wedding or a formal event, I see a bunch of groomsmen wearing identical tuxedos with identical cuff links and identical bow ties and even identical shirts. As you may have noticed, I am not one who blends in easily or willingly. Although I wear tuxedos routinely, I like to think that there is nothing routine about the way I do it. There is also a singular lack of variety in bow ties readily available for under thirty dollars. I therefore make my own bow ties too.

I do not believe that this movement toward uniqueness is unusual in me. The impulse is widespread, but I just have it in a somewhat more pronounced way.

Fortunately the cuff link design lends itself exactly to this sort of design adaptability and to keeping the labor to an absolute minimum.

It is design innovation that can save us to a certain extent from the monetary drain on the industrial societies caused by using third world labor.

On the other side of the coin, we also need to give some thought to our responsibility to help the poverty stricken populations. Not by exploiting them directly or indirectly as starvation wage laborers, but by innovating ways for them to be able to live less desperate lives with reasonable nutrition and sufficient potable water and adequate shelter and rewarding employment.

No day passes in which I do not think of the plight of the abjectly poor and starving and afflicted people of the world. And the other problems we face are of such magnitude and variety that we are really just overwhelmed.

And we, as members of an affluent society, are just as close to disaster as our poverty stricken fellow humans. I realize that it does not seem so. We distract ourselves from this fact with what amounts to utter nonsense. Outsourcing of labor will not solve anything. It simply delays the disaster.
Innovation is one of the answers but it is fraught with problems. Even so, it is still okay for us to be chatting about cuff links and jewelry. We will not make the world a better place by stamping out all luxury. A little bit of sugar makes the medicine go down.

Dickens wrote perhaps the best opening line in any piece of fiction ever. I will close with it now.

"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, ..."

Cordially,
Crockett