Differences

Anthropologists recently discovered in ancient Kenya two sets of footprints – both placed in the same time span.

Conclusion: people of differences co-existed.

Yes, they were different. Yes, homo sapiens survived violent upheavals (man-made) and evolutionary challenges (nature causes).

It doesn’t always have to be homogeneity (in group) since each group contains intra-DNA differences (in solidarity confinement, who are you going to argue with besides blaming your mistakes and missteps).

Many in the gay community emerge more creative and artistically valuable to humanity (In Cold Blood Capote, Kiss of the Spider Woman, Turing of Turing test). In Fame (or even in B/W 42nd Street, the movie) or “I miss Daniel so much”…young people couldn’t be someone else except flowing through the Academy of Performing Arts. The show must go on, cast and crew. Dim the light. Silence please. No phones. And……the Greatest Show on Earth….

You caught the drift… life viewed from different angles, seen via various lens and viewpoints: Renoir, Van Gogh, Monet…Frost, Kafka, Maugham. No wonder after seeing Raphaels in the Vatican, one author says he then can die.

Starting with ourselves, a product of gene variants, Mom’s and Pop’s, their parents’ and on up the chain.

You might be inbred or thoroughbred, with foreign-sounding accent or last name ( nickname acquired or anglicized), in wealth and health, Ladies of society or at the margins of it, you might even inherit traction and tradition e.g. Church of England or New College of Oxford whose Oak beams stood ready for planned replacement at the time it was first built. Your velocity and trajectory are set, or you might be homeless on Thanksgiving.

Differences exist, except when, per Michael Harrington (and the school of non-zero sum), you belong in “the Other America”. That’s why we have war and strife. Through the centuries onto 1967 in Newark, Detroit, Watts etc… The haves and have-not-s (the underlying ideologue that makes war and atrocities more excusable but no less brutal).

My land. Your land. My account>your account, my post commands more Likes …. our innate competitive nature, well-oiled machine of capitalism, then abundance and excess, revisionism and reckoning, classified before de-classified.

During an earthquake or wildfire, we – generic we- are vulnerable, floating on the same planet Earth, needing essential workers (the Other). Reagan zoomed out and negotiated nuclear-arms reduction based on a line in “the day the Earth stood still” i.e. unless it’s an alien invasion… In short, he fictionalized our non-fiction existential threat and in so doing, sealed the deal.

Man-made festivals, faiths and films (or Facebook) are just that: to occupy the time, a self-distracting self-inflicting drama and vain attempt to forget pain-filled reality e.g. opium for the mass, since years from now, we won’t be around even when/if the Earth stood still.

What’s left from us besides footprints and footnotes, fingerprints and digital prints, in Kenya or Kentucky.

Knowing that, each moment, each encounter and engagement, each step leaves ecological and emotional imprints (quite an exercise in imagination to be future anthropologist, in looking back and studying our machine-aided self-inflicted commiserated mutual mass destruction assurance).

Decades ago, we relied on experts and editors, artists and historians to curate or opine. Today, like an upside-down hourglass, the bottom billion go full throttle without guardrails, posting pent-up personal grievance in the vein of “revenge of the nerds” 2.0 courtesy of YouTube (before the membership wall went up).

Attention is now rarest of all commodities. Face to face time? Extinction.

Those footprints left long-ago in Kenya tell tales. That once upon a time, there were differences in sizes, directions and readings of reality.

Bi-pedalist we were and are, to move fast and break things, to argue among ourselves and to be self-contradictory, then to self-correct for group self-preservation against bigger forces e.g. dinosaurs (heck, we’re semi-irrational creatures – or else, why else would we need an education and guard rails).

Yes, at times, we are on a collision course (huge blind spot vs hindsight, play long or play short, sell the sizzle not the steak, selfless or selfish, the ruler vs the ruled). For the most part, we wobble along, whitewashing our meager history throughout the hot war, Cold war, nuclear war and post-post-Cold War. Not everyone was an Andrew Carnegie who donated to libraries, and not everyone nowadays a reader (of print).

Differences? Yes. Challenging. Most times.

The alternative? Stay in the cave. Dustin Hoffman stayed to plant tomatoes on the island, while our Papillon (Steve McQueen) observed then jumped the waves.

Professional and personal maturity exact a toll, both painful and uncomfortable (I never knew ballerinas dip their toes into grease before each practice) …. “When a child, I spoke like a child: ‘…will I be pretty…. Que sera sera’….”

” I am sorry” shows civility, humility and grace. So far, we hear that today in Kenya or Kentucky. Let’s stay that way.

I don’t know how we will be schooled in our next life (or the life after that). I just know this time around, we learn the ABC’s and respect (for grammar and grandma) then, lather, rinse, repeat in pursuit of life-long learning. Just like machine learning (which relies on us, fallible teachers we are, for its own misspelling).

Here and now, time and geography limit our freedom (the majority of shoppers go around in circle, a radius of 10 miles even in our jet age. Parlez Vous Francais, Monsieur Kushner, the father from Jersey).

Have you noticed Zelensky’s English get better as more aids flow through Ukraine (hint, Speech Communication everybody). Differences make for the better whole e.g. North Korea, South Korea, Left and Right – in between, the tired lite purple silent majority.

Even with the same 24 hours, each day unfolds differently for different folks. There goes the principle of Homogeneity Unit (for maximum efficiency, Taylorism, father of modern machine movement.)

How much more with millions of thoughts and DNA combinations each of us possesses.

Even among twins, from the same mother’s womb, we see different endings.

Differences make life interesting and engaging. The worst can be done to a human being is to cookie-cut him/her (I never forget Ewan McGregor in “the Island”, while in line at the cafeteria making conversation:” Perhaps some bacon and egg”) instead of the usual pathogen-free diet for organ-harvesting. Well, even when you’re raised for organ-harvesting, you still wish for something different (that makes life interesting). p.s. Telegram founder donated sperms to father more than 100 children, whose inheritance is more than 130 million per sperm.

If so, then there is no further need for Amazon-recommending and launching new product or introducing a new spoke person for a new generation. The day the Earth stood still: no intrigue nor another “Ah ha” moment. Chuck Chink! I don’t need no education… Everyone is OK (inside the box).

Our Steven King’s The Shining writer got writer’s block and cabin-fever, inside a full-vacancy hotel, monotonously moving from room to room in dimly lit hallway:” I am so bored, I am so bored, I am so bored” “The night is….swell? near?….or it’s been always like this…dark and dusty ” No illumination. No painted sky. Just saline and sterilized this side of covid. (BTW, typewriters are back, so is vinyl; I sure hope and look forward to the 60’s and 70’s retro).

Insanity is when one hopes for a different result yet doing the same thing day in and out (in the name of routine, rituals or atomic habits). Climb rigorously, even to the top, but on the wrong mountain e.g. programmatic targeting software CEO, who sold his business to ATT, so ads can follow us relentlessly.

We are with various features, facial expressions and artistic impulses. Techno-autocratic government will need much more powerful quantum power and mini-cameras for facial recognition as it once did with voice prints in “the Conversation”.

Differences exist (even among the billions of Chinese, or Indian).

Differences are good (or else, it’s inbred – just Jews, no Gentiles).

Yes, it’s challenging to manage diversity (or else, why would CEO get paid multiple times than line).

Let’s see, what tie am I wearing today? IBM clones? or Island white? Obama wanted to take this mundane decision out each morning to lessen his presidential burden of everyday decision making.

Wait, see what Alexa prefers? A whiter shade of pale? What else do you expect from a closet full of grey. Homogeneity cuts out the fat, resulting in blandness. DOGE, DOGE, DOGE.

The flip side finds a wall full of Renoir or Van Gogh, Monet and yes, Raphaels… unlike Reagan’s “oatmeal meat” in his humble early years (Yesteryear Metropolitan Museum displays Black/White Hollywood vanishing stars, with frizzy hair and dark lipstick, “Play it again, Sam”). It’s time for color TV, for a new version of Fame,” I goanna live forever” …singularity is nearer,

In ancient Kenya, they discovered different sets of footprints. Yet for us, living in our jet age, we still shop within only 10 miles per habit. In Machine-gun preacher, our protagonist spoke to his wife from Sudan, where live chicken was running around- meanwhile, his PA wife shopping (at Weis supermarket? where I once was a packer) surrounded by cage-free eggs, organics eggs etc… Eggs, come to think of it, are better than people, for being “cage-free”, while many among us, are not. Dustin Hoffman we are, preferably pre-set, Prime-delivered.

Solutions in a box. Efficient and maximizing in containerizing. Uniformity and Uberizing. That’s when technocrats converge with Theo-crats, to bring Heaven to Earth, Eternity to the Here and Now.

How I wish today’s menu got something like bacon and eggs, on the “Island” as it is in Heaven.