Before I get started, I thought I'd dive a little more into myself to offer some additional background.
I know what you're thinking.
"Wait, what! More about this guy? I already read the home page intro and the 'about' section. When's he actually gonna talk about something other than himself?"
And fair enough!
Please bear with me a little longer. Just sort of trying to set the stage here.
I like to consider myself open to reassessing and reevaluating my positions in light of compelling, articulate, intelligent, well-reasoned information.
But I will never defend, nor apologize for, unchained avarice and greed that festers and rots at the core of our democracy, undermining our public institutions that make us the envy of many around the world. Wealth inequality has exploded since the start of supply-side, trickle-down economics. The fortunes of the few have soared astronomically, while the rest have mostly seen negligible to nonexistent gains over the past few decades. With perhaps very, very few exceptions, the billionaire class simply does not care about us.
Yet I'm nevertheless eternally grateful for the immense good fortune of having the stroke of luck to exist at this point in our history. We stand on the shoulders of humanity's brightest minds, with little digital devices at our fingertips that we take for granted, but that people a generation ago, never mind centuries back, would never have been able to conjure up in their wildest dreams.
I mean seriously, flushing toilets, fridges or a simple light switch would have been enough to blow some minds barely a century ago. Even those of humble means, at least in developed nations today, essentially live like emperor god kings compared to the average peasant from the early 1900s, not to mention any prior century or millennium.
Yet as the late civil rights leader MLK Jr. said, our scientific and technological abundance stands in glaring contrast with our poverty of the spirit. We have guided missiles, but misguided men at the helm.
And scientists like astrophysicist Carl Sagan warned about the fragility of a democracy built on high technology that most people can barely begin to grasp.
"We've arranged a society based on science and technology, in which nobody understands anything about science and technology. This combustible mixture of ignorance and power, sooner or later, is going to blow up in our faces. Who is running the science and technology, in a democracy, if the people don't know anything about it?" Sagan once said.
He also argued we must practise skepticism and education. Otherwise, we don't run the government. The government runs us.
"If we are not able to ask skeptical questions, to interrogate those who tell us that something is true, to be skeptical of those in authority, then we're up for grabs for the next charlatan, political or religious, who comes ambling along."
I personally believe Mr. Sagan predicted the rise of the so-called US president decades before that malignant cancer that had been slowly growing metastasized itself into what I can only hope is not a terminal tumour.
At the turn of the millennium, despite the nonsense about Y2K, I had essentially unbridled optimism for the future of our species. Things seemed to be going so swimmingly, and there was nowhere to go but to infinity and beyond.
I would never have thought we would end up in a backwards world where greedy billionaires who build their fortunes on the backs of an exploited labour class are revered by millions as benevolent saviors, while shifting all of the blame for the world's problems on scapegoats like the poor, immigrant, and drug addicts.
Yet here we are.
Let's start a conversation, shall we?