Archive
January 19, 2024
Two Encounters in the Empire State Plaza Concourse (Albany, New York, USA)
I'm pleased to confide that I rewrote my LinkedIn About section while still under the influence of having been addressed by one person as if I were a small child and having been ignored completely by a man who should have lined up behind me. The encounters occurred minutes before closing time at the Empire State Plaza Concourse post office, where I was waiting to be served.
I confess that I could be wrong about what happened. Maybe the first person was being nice. Maybe the man saw me let the first person go ahead and assumed on that basis what he told me when I asked what he’d been thinking. He said I’d looked like I was just waiting for someone.
However, I dress very casually these days and carry a backpack. I’ve been told that the concourse has “a homeless problem,” as if the presence of an increasing number of homeless people were not a beneficial warning to the legislators and government employees about serious problems in our society that need their attention to preserve that society for the benefit of all. I also can’t recall either person having offered their thanks after I let them go to the window ahead of me.
I don’t mind being taken for an unhoused person. It gives me the opportunity to challenge people’s perceptions. Also, unhoused people burden Nature far less than prosperous folk, who are widely admired for the consumerist behavior that’s causing Nature to scream Stop!, in the memorable phrase of Pope Francis.
I’m no holy person, but even I won’t talk about the destruction of our world, or the depletion of the necessities of life, by the rapacity of filthy rich people. That would be wrong. Every person has dignity that must be acknowledged. I would never deviate from people-first language. Therefore, I’ll tell you that Nature is being destroyed, and economically insecure people are being rendered homeless, by the rapacity of people who are filth because they remain rich while others are poor.
My own perceptions and memory are influenced by my expectations, which lead me astray on occasion. Still, I have to go with my impression of what happened in the post office, bearing in mind that I could be wrong. In further defense of the two people I encountered, I'm pretty confident that neither was rich, and I know that hatred of the poor is widespread in our nation, where wealth speaks loudly.
You’re invited to join my LinkedIn network. Here's my new About statement:
I'm proud to have dropped out of high school, out of the top graduate program in condensed matter physics in the United States, and out of science after finishing a doctorate in theoretical physics, because these acts betoken my refusal to be inculcated with the consumerist, militarist, pronatalist, religiocentric, racist, sexist, ableist, homophobic, transphobic, anthropocentric values so prevalent in the nation of my birth. These values are dragging a million species to extinction on a planet we do not own. Our own species is one of those endangered by the behavior that emerges in keeping with these values, as it has been since before I started refusing to go to school at age 14, in 1984. Christmas of 1984, the first I spent institutionalized, fell in the last month that the global monthly average temperature was less than its 20th century average. Not everyone earning less money than they might is failing. Some simply refuse to adopt the brutality necessary to participate fully in the so-called meritocracy. I write to promote thoughtful living by humans and hence justice for all life on Earth. My essays have appeared in the Albany Times Union and the Albany Student Press. My letters have appeared in the Albany Times Union and The Washington Post. I blog at https://www.godispoor.org/, at https://www.proudfatherofnone.org/, and at https://www.momshair.org/.
October 20, 2023
For me, the scariest part of Pres. Biden’s speech last night on Israel and Ukraine came at the end: “... we have to remember who we are. We’re the United States of America—the United States of America—and there is nothing, nothing beyond our capacity if we do it together.” I was reminded of Pres. Biden’s preening response to Scott Pelley’s question on 60 Minutes about whether the wars in Ukraine and Israel could be more than we could handle: “We’re the United States of America, for God’s sake.”
The idea that no endeavor is beyond the capabilities of the United States is magical thinking. The United States has unambiguously lost at least two wars in the past fifty years. Pres. Biden presided over the end of one of those wars, though the loss was not of his making. I fear that Pres. Biden has a kind of Roman Catholic faith that makes him think that his will is good and that good always prevails in the end. Even if unrelenting brinkmanship brings about a worldwide catastrophe in which billions die, it might well be the will of God, so why worry? Just do the right thing, which is whatever Pres. Biden wills.
The problem with faith in God is that no one has access to faith in God. We can have faith only in our mental model of God, which is based on things people have told us. Even the word of God, regardless of one’s religion, had human curators and editors. Many people seem to think that faith in God is simply the belief that they, themselves, and possibly their loved ones, will be all right in the end, but that's a bit parochial. Certainly, Pres. Biden does not have direct access to God.
In our world today, some people have faith in models of God that tell them to kill Israeli children. Others have faith in models of God that tell them to kill Palestinian children. Maybe some people are killing children strictly for ungodly reasons, but I’m confident that plenty of people are killing children for what they think are godly reasons. I think this points out the benefits of thinking for oneself instead of relying on faith in what other people have said God wants, because God ought to be clever enough to get what He wants without asking people to kill children.
If I ever encounter a being who claims to be God and expresses disapproval of my efforts to discourage people from killing children in their name, I’ll tell them to go to hell, where they belong. If a being ever tells me to my face that the United States cannot lose a war, despite having done so a couple of years earlier, I’ll gently suggest that they lay down any significant responsibilities they currently bear.