Being grown up:
For those of you faithful who still check from time to time, here is a little thing. Sorry about the long silence, but I’ve had a mountain to climb so-to-speak, and while I can’t claim to have reached the top, I do seem to be getting signs that there really is a top. So don’t give up on me altogether quite yet.
As I mentioned, I’ve been thinking about how people grow up. We start out as helpless babies, of course, so if we survive it’s because somebody took care of us. I don’t know whether a baby worries a lot or whether it just assumes there will be care, but generally there is care. A state that will go nameless here has just instituted a sort of a night drop for babies. Even before the ATM, if you had money or a check to put in the bank, you could do so. There was this armored box with a nice big clanky door to assure you that all was well in hand, so you took your deposit and dropped it in even after hours. Then there was the ATM, and now those who are up to date just have any money they are getting transferred directly to the account. Well in the state in question it has long been possible to take a baby you could not care for and drop it off at a hospital, fire department or police station, and it would be accepted with no threat of penalty to you. Now it’s a box at a nice temperature. So you put the baby in, and if the machine happens to be working that day a signal goes off somewhere and in due course the baby is collected. Me, I’d want to place it in human hands, but then I’ve never had a baby of any sort, and I guess were I to be giving one up I’d not like having to look somebody in the eye while I did so.
So we get cared for. Later, as teenagers, we are generally still cared for even though our physical resilience has increased amazingly. And then as adults generally we kind of think there is a caring agent around somewhere.
Let me concoct a list: family, God, some supernatural equivalent of God, science, the government, Nature, extra-terrestrial intelligence … that’s enough to make a list. Now each of these things might, in theory, be looking out for us. And I’m sure that each has its true believers, those who take comfort in their faith. And for each I’m sure there are those who take the attitude that such faith is utterly mad, that the agent involved is either powerless, indifferent or both. And for each I’m quite sure there are those who believe for each of them that there is the enemy.
I’d never try to dissuade anyone of their religion or whatever other comfort they may prefer. But we do have to grow up, and that involves taking responsibility for ourselves. And then there is the matter of track record.
Obviously if the babies of the earth should stop coming everything we have put our hearts into creating would vanish in time and lose all possible meaning.
And babies do stop coming. I have a little terra cotta figuring of a young woman. I am told it is thousands of years old, and I am also told that such things are not numerous. I ran across a number once, and there were less than 200 known. I simply don’t believe that. Were it true, I would feel obliged to place it in the hands of some museum. It’s worthless to science, of course, since the only provenance I can offer is to say I got it out of a catalogue of such things, you know, ancient coins and so forth. But something so precious and rare should not be my private property. You’ve seen the picture on the front page of my site.
Well this thing was, it is presumed, a token promoting fertility. Many would say, “Oh, they needed to have lots of babies in those days because so many died.” But I don’t believe that. Keeping babies alive is a very strong motivation; we’re really good at it.
What it says to me is that for thousands of years time and again the babies have stopped. And it seems to be happening again. When I mention this, I am not able to get the evidence out before I here words to the effect that this or that among the guardian agents is going to fix it.
History says otherwise. If it gets fixed it’s because we fix it. Done anything along those lines recently?
There have been 100 visitors, oh loyal ones, over the past month and YouTube has so far played “Babies Triumph over Evil” 236 times.