Pumkin Presence
Greetings and salutations from the sand, sun and surf of Cape Cod, Martha’s Vineyard and the cool, breezy, partly cloudy island of Nantucket! Great to be with you on this twenty-fifth day of October, 2013, a rather brisk one out there on the Hyannis waterfront, with that stiff breeze blowing in from the north/northwest… Yes, it is Friday and the news is all focused in on the rolling out of the Affordable Care Act otherwise known as “Obamacare”. Yes sir with the twisting and turning fortunes of the republican party (favorable rating at a forty year low of 30 percent) as well as the radical and dare I say dangerous, anti-government puppet show (brought to you by a few Oligarchs like the Koch Brothers) known as the ‘tea party’ (favorable rating hovering a dropping to 28 percent), indeed with these ‘fortunes’ all front and center for the world to see, i.e. the disastrous government shutdown and near default on our debts, costing the country 24 billion, eases it’s way out of our collective conscience, oh wait one moment, I must have been mad! This is not the end of the insanity of said tea party, for it wishes the government, as a whole, to fail, ushering in the new era of corporate owned democracy. That’s right folks, it’s the Exxon-Mobile ‘Washington’ monument and the Goldman Sachs ‘Statue of Liberty’, for now that the chickens have come home to roost, WE SEA the fallout from the tragic “Citizens United” case where the Roberts court ruled 5-4 that ‘corporations are people too’ (credit Mitt Romney), ushering in millions upon millions into the campaign coffers of men and women who will do their masters’ bidding, i.e. passing legislation THEY approve and indeed architect and blocking legislation, e.g. “Obamacare”, they disapprove of. This landmark ruling has made it possible that money equals speech, allowing corporations to funnel vast sums to the already gerrymandered districts while they suppress the vote in places like North Carolina and Texas, putting reasonable republicans at risk of losing elections to crazy people like Ted Cruz and the like in the House as well as stacking the deck against the democrats in the general election. The quaint notion of “one man equals one vote” is going the way of the Dodo bird and the powerful crack like power of campaign ads soak the airwaves, shrieks and lies almost impossible to escape, thus turning this democracy into a plutocracy, or rule by the wealthy, if it isn’t already that already. Take, for example the Koch Brothers, who spent nearly 260 million dollars in 2012 on negative ads against President Obama’s reelection bid, not to mention his signature health care LAW, with no one knowing just how much they have spent this year with frightful ads attempting to LIE to the youth in this great nation that “Obamacare” is not kosher. Fiddlesticks! With a combined wealth of 70 billion, David and Charles Koch can afford this kind of power play, with that number only going up if the Keystone Pipeline is passed, you know that horrible tar sands project that will only serve to bind this country to yet another dirty source of energy, as the earth continues to warm, yes, the ‘Brother’s Koch’, not to be confused with the “Brothers Grimm”, although their fairy tales are just a frightening, will stand to gain 100 billion dollars in real estate and other goodies, making those guys the wealthiest men in the United States, by far. Pretty scary if you think about it, for these mega polluters are dooming the planet for future generations, as the fracking fluids fowl OUR God given water supply, while the toxic (596 deadly chemicals, all secret) fumes from the wells poison the family whose land it sits upon. Hmmmmm. Fifty years ago, three days ago, on October 22, 1963, President John F. Kennedy gave a speech in Washington D.C., the Academy of Science I believe, about the importance of empirical science. Facts that cannot be disputed or used as a political football, put up for sale to the highest bidder. Back on that October morning our 35th President relied heavily on his “influential science adviser”, Jerome B. Weisner (former President of MIT), a man who helped Kennedy see just how important a challenge it is that we, as a ‘collective species’, maintain our ever present vision on what is truly important–our peoples as a whole, around the world, our environment, our deep seeded motivation to keep progressing towards excellence, ignoring successes and above all remembering and practicing that the realities of Justice, world peace, equality, compassion, charity, patience, kindness, truth and paramount above all, LOVE, for by losing sight of those traits we all have deep down within, we mock God’s great creation, mankind at his, or her best, and that would seem to be the only sin ‘we’ as a species commit. When we are not aligned with these principals, we are in sin, and thus a nation suffers. Please do not claim to be a follower of Christ, when you cannot SEA that you cannot follow two masters. Here are those words, Jack Kennedy spoke a month before he left this earthly plane, a great loss. However, his passion for these ideals are not, nor will they ever be, lost upon a grateful nation and writer at your service… (thanks to “The Last Word, with Lawrence O’Donnell, airing weeknights at 10 p.m. eastern only on MSNBC). “It’s impressive to reflect, that over a hundred years ago, in the midst of a savage internal war, the United States congress established a body devoted to the advancement of scientific research. The recognition then of the value of “abstract science” ran against the traditional preoccupation with technology and engineering. You will remember DeTocqueville’s famous chapter on why the Americans are more addicted to practical than to theoretical science. DeTocqueville concluded that, “the more democratic a society, the more will discoveries immediately applicable to productive society confer gain, fame, and even power to their authors.” But if one were to name a single thing which points up the difference this century has made in the American attitude toward science, it would certainly be the wholehearted understanding today of the importance of pure science. We realize now that progress in technology depends on progress in theory; that the most abstract investigations can lead to the most concrete results; and that the vitality of a scientific community springs from its passion to answer science’s most fundamental questions. In a recent speech to the General Assembly of the United Nations, I proposed a worldwide program to protect land and water, forests and wildlife, to combat exhaustion and erosion, to stop the contamination of water and air by industrial as well as nuclear pollution, and to provide for the steady renewal and expansion of the natural bases of life. The earth can be an abundant mother to all of the people that will be born in the coming years, if we learn how to use her with skill and wisdom, to heal her wounds, replenish her vitality, and utilize her potentialities. And the necessity is now urgent and worldwide, for few nations embarked on the adventure of development have the resources to sustain the ever growing population and rising standard of living… We all stand committed to make this agreeable hope a reality. This seems to me the greatest challenge to science in our times, to use the world’s resources, to expand life and hope for the world’s inhabitants… Ours is a century of scientific conquest and scientific triumph. If scientific discovery has not been an unalloyed blessing, if it has not conferred on mankind the power to not only create, but also to annihilate, it has at the same time provided humanity with a supreme challenge and supreme testing. If the challenges and the testing prove too much for humanity, then we are all doomed. But, I believe that the future can be bright, and I believe it can be certain. Man is still the master of his own fate, and I believe that the power of science and the responsibility of science offered mankind a new opportunity, not only for intellectual growth, but for moral discipline; not only for the acquisition of knowledge, but for the strengthening of our nerve and our will. We are bound to grope for a time as we grapple with problems without precedent in human history. But wisdom is the child of experience. In the years since man unlocked the power stored in the atom, the world has made progress, halting but effective, towards bringing that power under human control. The challenge, in short may be our salvation.” PRESERVE THE WILDERNESS! Peace~M
