PSEUDO-INTELLECTUAL.COM

Earlier today, as I was walking down the street in Santa Monica, I stopped at a crosswalk. A family of five - father, mother, three golden-haired little daughters - was standing in front of me. Each child held a balloon by the string.

One little girl lost her grip on the string and her balloon floated away. I half-expected her to cry, but then her face lit up with joy.

An instant later, her sisters let loose their balloons as well, and started jumping up and down with delight as they floated away. Utterly charming, right?

As the balloons were released, their father - a lean, bespectacled little man wearing a fanny pack - freaked out.

“No, girls!” he shouted. “It’s bad for the environment - it’s bad for the environment!”

All three children immediately fell silent. This shrill, pathetic little man with the deeply lined forehead glared up at the balloons as they drifted away - then realized that everyone standing at the crosswalk was looking at him.

Unapologetic to the very last, he planted his fists on his hips and brooded while his guilt-ridden children looked down at the pavement. The mother didn’t look at any of them - she just kept waiting for the light to change. When it finally did, they silently hustled their children across the street into a parking garage.

Now I ask you…

What kind of a man utterly crushes the joy of his children because three balloons will eventually drift to earth and comprise perhaps one ounce of refuse?

Sure, I pity the green, leafy plants they land on - I pity the cute, tiny animals that may become entangled in the string. But despite this… does one shout at his completely innocent children to illustrate this point?

I’ve met his type many times. He radiated tension, even before his outburst. And he was a short son of a bitch, maybe an inch shorter than his wife.

Without fail, every man I have ever met standing beneath five foot five was an anal retentive jerk - and this sorry excuse for a human being proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that my theory is not only true, it is an axiom.

Can someone please tell me… why are these people reproducing?

The other day I was doing research for a personal project, and found this quote in an issue of LIFE magazine:

In an important sense, this world of ours is a new world, in which the unity of knowledge, the nature of human communities, the order of society, the order of ideas, the very notions of society and culture have changed, and will not return to what they have been in the past. What is new is not new because it has never been there before, but because it has changed in quality.

One thing that is new is the prevalence of newness, the changing scale and scope of change itself, so that the world alters as we walk in it, so that the years of a man’s life measure not some small growth or rearrangement or moderation of what he learned in childhood, but a great upheaval.

What is new is that in one generation our knowledge of the natural world engulfs, upsets, and complements all knowledge of the natural world before. The techniques, among which and by which we live, multiply and ramify, so that the whole world is bound together by communication, blocked here and there by the immense synapses of political tyrrany.

The global quality of the world is new: our knowledge of and sympathy with remote and diverse peoples, our involvement with them in practical terms and our commitment to them in terms of brotherhood. What is new in the world is the massive character of dissolution and corruption of authority, in belief, in ritual, and in temporal order.

Yet this is the world that we have come to live in. The very difficulties which it presents derive from growth in understanding, in skill, in power. To assail the changes that have unmoored us from the past is futile, and in a deep sense, I think it is wicked. We need to recognize the change and learn what resources we have…

That was written by J. Robert Oppenheimer - in 1955! Yet it could have been written yesterday.

Just a little food for thought on Memorial Day.