Short Take 1/4/05

The big news this last week has of course been the huge 9 point earthquake and subsequent tsunami in the Indian Ocean. One very interesting thing I've heard reported about this event is that in Sri Lanka, where tens of thousands of people were killed by the tsunami, rescue workers also
expected to find many dead elephants and other dead animals of all sorts. But to their great surprise, they did not find any animals at all killed by the tsunami. Apparently the animals have some sort of survival instinct that humans do not, and they somehow sensed or knew that the tsunami was coming and they moved out of the way of the danger. The humans did not have
this same survival instinct and the giant wave caught them by surprise. Of course this begs the question, are humans really smarter than animals? We like to think that we're much smarter than animals because we can play computer games and ride around impressing everyone else in Cadillacs and Hummers and Mustangs and so forth, but events like this can make you wonder if
maybe the animals are really smarter than humans after all. Actually, now I can't absolutely confirm this, but I bet there were some people, a few, who did have a sense that the tsunami was coming, same as the animals, and they did get out of the way. And probably there were a few cases where these people tried to warn their friends and family members and get them to move out of the way of the tsunami too. But their friends probably said something like, "You're a kook! You're a crazy conspiracy theorist! Why are you always so negative? Just think positive and everything will be fine!" And I see a lot of parallels to this in life. It often looks to me like most people either don't have or must have completely lost their normal healthy survival instincts, and don't seem to have any idea at all of the huge danger they are in either because of what they are doing or failing to do. For
instance, I see that most people now pay for their stuff at the grocery store with some sort of plastic card, either a credit card or debit card or food stamp card. I think this is nuts. If you pay with a credit card then you haven't finished the deal yet, and you're going to have to pay later, and you
are likely to end up paying more for the stuff because of the interest charges.
And I hear that credit card debt is an enormous problem for many millions of Americans. I often get phone calls from companies wanting to help me manage my credit card debts, which I don't have any of, but there must be plenty of people who do for these companies to stay in business. I've never had a credit card because I seemed to have some survival instinct that told me right from the start when they first brought out these credit cards, that these things are a bad deal, these are a scam to get you in debt and make you pay a lot more for your stuff than it's really worth. Plus, you
might remember that soon after 9-11, the government announced that they were setting up an office for Total Information Awareness. They wanted to collect complete information on every detail of every person's life and no doubt they're doing it. So, no doubt every time you use your plastic swipe
card, a record of who you are and what you're buying goes into a database, and the government and the banks and the major multinational corporations have access to it, and they will figure out some way to use this information you give them against you. That's what government does, is continually find more and more reasons to get you in trouble and put you in prison.
Everything that's really criminal, was against the law over 100 years ago. But every year the governments pass thousands more new laws, to continually define more and more of normal life as criminal so they have ever more reasons to put you in prison. So the more information they have about you, the more reasons they will be able to find to get you in trouble. I think it's much
better to pay cash, get the deal over and done with, and people who have no business knowing about what you buy, won't know. But I think most Americans have lost their healthy survival instincts and will go on buying everything with their plastic swipe cards. Another area where it looks to me like most Americans have lost their survival instincts has to do with health.
This is a huge one. For instance, when I was in high school my social life wasn't so happy so my parents sent me to a psychiatrist. He prescribed Valium for me and gave me some pills to take . My survival instincts told me this was the wrong thing to do, that you don't solve your problems with drugs, and I had heard that Valium was a very dangerous addictive drug. So as soon as I was out of his office I threw his pills in the garbage and never went back to him. And since then I've found many ways to improve my physical and mental health without taking drugs. Yoga has been very helpful for instance. But I see tens of millions of Americans are trying to solve their problems by
taking extremely dangerous addictive drugs like Prozac, Paxil, Zoloft, Ritalin and so forth. The effects of Prozac are very similar to LSD, and I've heard Republican hypocrites who condemn the hippies for trying to solve their problems by taking LSD to escape reality, say that Prozac is good
for people and it's good for them to take it. These drugs have many harmful side effects and have caused many people to commit suicide and murder. Food is another area where it looks to me like most people have no healthy survival instincts. If they did, then I think they would never eat anything with aspartame in it, or white sugar or white flour or margarine or hydrogenated oil and they'd never touch anything that had been microwaved. But most people go on eating these things and cancer and many other terrible diseases are absolutely rampant as a result. I'm out of time, so if you have any healthy survival instincts left, please listen to them and I hope you've enjoyed this Short Take.