lighting the way

Well written post Beagles.

Originally the hippies were stone apolitical.  Politics was square, something establishment types got involved in.  But then came the Yippies, Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman and the gang, and they looked like us and their politics were lefty but also kind of absurdist.  They were kind of cool, they appealed to us.  And they were anti war like us, and they liked dope.  Smoking dope was not just something you did for fun anymore, it was a way of sticking it to the man.  You could be a new lefty and a hippie at the same time and most hippies adopted that political posture.

I'm sure you know that the Weathermen took their name from that Bob Dylan line, "You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows."  Suddenly there was SDS, there was something called the Port Huron Statement, they had conventions where they chanted lines from Mao's red book.  Red China was cool.  The Soviet Union was not, with their bureaucracy and their greyness they just looked like another establishment to us.

The Weathermen went underground, they started making bombs.  They blew up some building at the University of Wisconsin.  They thought it would be empty, but they killed a janitor.  I was a janitor in southern Illinois at the time and I didn't like that one bit.

The weather, the last outpost of god.  Time was everything in the dark universe was explained by saying it was god doing it, but then science came along and explained this and that, and god was pushed back into metaphysical spirituality, into the heavens.  Truth be told the heavens are pretty well understood these days, and so is its interface with us, the weather, but we can't predict it.  Well we can in general, but not so closely that you can know for sure if you should take along your umbrella when going to the store.

Damn weathermen.  We can send a rocket to Mars, but we can't tell whether it is going to rain tomorrow.  Well sending a rocket to Mars is kind of simple.  Figuring out the fuel and how to pack it in so as not to blow up the rocket on the launch pad is difficult, but not impossible, but after that, to plot its trajectory all you need is the calculus that college freshmen are taught.

The difference is that the rocket does not change the orbit of Mars, well a teensy bit since mass attracts mass, but too teensy to matter in the calculations.  The weather though is the movement of gasses, and every molecule attracts every other molecule and there are a gazillion gazillion of them, and the best our streak of lightning computers can come up with is a vague approximation.  Makes as much sense to pray for a sunny day for the church picnic a couple weeks away as to consult with the meteorologists in their spotless lab coats and their blow dry hair. 

And the sociologists, they have to contend with seven billion people, far less than a gazillion gazillion, but people are much more complex than gas molecules, and if you take into account all the brain cells in every person I think you are getting into gazillion territory.  

So it's a mad storm and people in these troubled times know not where to turn.  Thank goodness then for the clear light of reason of The Institute shining out towards the lost and leading the way.

I think we can use this for our next pledge drive.